A Pound of Flesh
by brihana25
Summary: An episode tag for "Two" that leads into an AU from the second half of "Some Assembly Required" : Acting under their original orders, Bird and Tuck kidnap Alec from Crash. Complete summary and warnings inside; please read them. Gen. COMPLETE
1. Prologue

**FANDOM**: Dark Angel

**TITLE**: A Pound of Flesh

**GENRE**: Gen

**CATEGORY**: Angst, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, Episode Related, AU

**RATING**: R

**SEASON**: Two

**PAIRING**: none

**WORD COUNT**: 35,123

**SUMMARY**: An episode tag for "Two" that leads into an AU from the second half of "Some Assembly Required" : Acting under their original orders, the Steelheads known as Bird and Tuck kidnap Alec from Crash in an effort to find and regain control of Zack. By the time Max and Logan realize that Alec is in trouble, he's already been made an unwilling participant in British Eddy's organ smuggling ring. What begins as a search and rescue mission to recover a missing X5 will become a battle for survival – one that pits Alec against his own failing body and fractured mind.

**DISCLAIMER**: Dark Angel, its characters and situations, are copyright James Cameron, Charles H. Eglee and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. No infringement on, or challenge to, their status is intended. This piece of fiction was written strictly for the entertainment of other fans, and I am gaining no form of compensation for it.

**MORE DISCLAIMERS**: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or actual places and locations, is purely coincidental.

**AUTHOR'S NOTES**:

Eternal thanks and gratitude to whisper99, without whom this story wouldn't exist. And I mean that sincerely. The bunny for this sprang forth from her brain, and so did several of the details. On top of that, she gave me inspiration, pokes, prods, and advice all the way through. If not for her, I'd have probably given up a long time ago.

Also thanks to moonshayde and switch842, two of the best betas on the planet. They kept me honest, kept me writing, and above all, kept me sane. Oh, and yeah, they read the crap that I pumped out and helped me make it readable. :)

Enormous thanks to forcryinoutloud, for not only being such an incredibly kickass admin and giving us the smallfandom_bb to play in, but also for being an amazingly talented artist and making for me an incredible cover image for this story.

Also, to seramercury, for swooping in, in true superhero style, and saving my story from going unclaimed for art, and for making me a great trailer vid set to some killer music.

You can find both at the Small Fandom BigBang website (linked from the smallfandom_bb LiveJournal).

**WARNINGS: **dark, disturbing, and potentially triggery content, violence, kidnapping, torture, forced drugging, mental anguish, control and consent issues, a rather descriptive scene of surgery being performed on a conscious person, and allusions to/discussion of non-consensual sex (not explicit, not shown)

**

* * *

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**Prologue**

_We know what you are._

The words echoed in his mind long after the Steelhead girl called Lux had left the bar. He knew there was a threat there, but exactly how serious that threat was, and what he should be doing about it, he hadn't yet decided.

_We know what you are._

"We know who you are" would have been a completely different story. It might still have surprised him, but it wouldn't have been a big deal. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Alec McDowell was nothing more than a bike messenger. Logan's contacts did good work – almost as good as Manticore did – and it would take more digging than most people were either willing or able to do to find out that Alec McDowell had only existed for six weeks. "We know who you are" wouldn't have really been a threat. "We know who you are" could have been dealt with.

But she hadn't said "who." She'd said "what."

And she'd said it after she'd seen his bar code.

Alec swallowed hard and turned back to the bar, running his finger around the rim of his beer glass absently as his thoughts swirled round in his head. He could still feel the cold steel of her spiked fingernails against the back of his neck, the warmth of her breath against his skin as she whispered in his ear.

_We know what you are._

He shuddered involuntarily at the memory, reaching up with his right hand to pull the collar of his jacket just a bit higher.

He had to tell Max.

At least one ordinary in Seattle claimed to know "what" he was, though how "ordinary" Lux actually was could be debated. And going by the words she'd used, she wasn't the only one. She'd talked about her friends, the ones that he already knew. And she'd said "we know," not "I know."

So, there was a group of people who knew about him. Three of them were Steelheads that he'd happily thumped on earlier in the day, and the other one vibrated when she touched him.

Alec let his head fall forward and closed his eyes as another thought occurred to him.

_Max is going to kill me._

She already held him responsible for everything from his own training at Manticore, to the orders he'd been given while he was there, to people he'd never even met double-crossing her. She would definitely blame him for running afoul of a group of Steelheads in a turf war over drugs, getting Sketchy involved and beaten up, pounding on them in return, and risking the exposure of all Transgenics in Seattle because now there were people out there who knew "what" he was.

Okay, so that last part really was his fault, but that wasn't the point.

He couldn't tell Max.

He'd just have to figure out how to fix the problem by himself. How hard could it be? He'd been trained since he was nine years old to deal with problems on his own, and he functioned best when he was alone. No one around to distract him, no one else to worry about if things went sideways or if he screwed up somehow.

So, alone he was and alone he would stay, at least until he'd solved his Steelhead problem. He'd have to make sure that Max never caught wind of anything that had happened to Sketchy that morning or what Lux had just said to him. Sketchy's silence should be easy enough to buy, and he knew that he wouldn't be ratting himself out.

Everything was going to work out just fine.

He felt the hand on his arm only a fraction of a second after he realized someone was standing beside him, and he snapped his head up. He caught the man's scent and immediately shut down the hyperalert state that he'd shifted into. He was so mixed up by his own thoughts that his reflexes were off; he'd have to work on that. By the time he turned to face the man at his side, he'd plastered a smile on his face and wasn't giving any indication of what he'd been thinking about only seconds before.

"You okay?" Logan's question sounded sincere enough, and Alec couldn't help but wonder why he asked it. Never mind that no one ever asked him if he was okay – not that he'd ever really answer them anyway – but that made the second time that Logan had asked him in one day. It had to be some sort of common conversation starter for him, because Alec doubted very highly that Logan was actually worried about him.

"Yeah," he answered with a quick grin before he turned back to his beer. "I'm fine. Why?"

Logan leaned his left elbow on the bar and seemed to be making himself comfortable there. He certainly didn't look to be leaving any time soon. "You looked a million miles away for a few minutes, there. You sure you're not hurt?"

Alec lowered his eyebrows in equal part confusion and suspicion. "Why would I be?"

"Well, Isaac threw you around pretty good. And besides, I know my hearing's not as finely attuned as yours, but I do recognize the sound of a fight when I hear it. Even over a cell phone."

Alec nodded his head briefly before turning away again, hoping that Logan hadn't seen the worried expression that he knew had flashed across his face. He'd forgotten that Logan had heard him pounding on the Steelheads earlier. He'd have to think fast to come up with an explanation that would not only be acceptable to Logan but would convince him to leave it be. His silence wouldn't be nearly as easy to secure as Sketchy's; Alec doubted that fifty bucks would mean as much to Logan as it did to Sketch.

As all these thoughts flew through his mind, outwardly Alec only shrugged and said, "It was nothing."

"Something to do with those 'bad guys' you got the money from?"

Alec shrugged but didn't say anything. Was Logan really going to make it that easy?

Logan nodded once before turning his head toward the bar. "As long as you're all right."

This time, Alec's grin was real. Yes, Logan really was going to make it that easy. "Yeah, I'm good." He picked up his beer and took another long drink.

Logan pushed the beer Lux had left on the bar away from him and motioned to the bartender for one of his own.

"How'd you get my number anyway?"

Logan handed the bartender a few bills before picking up his beer and turning to lean his elbow against the bar again. "I called JamPony, thinking you might have been there. You were already gone, so Normal told me how to get a hold of you."

Almost as if anticipating Alec's instinctive need for isolation, Logan continued. "I was going to wait until it scrolled off, but I can delete it now if you want me to." He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped it open, preparing to do just that.

Alec had reached out with his hand, bringing it down on top of Logan's and stopping him before he'd even fully realized that he'd moved. "No," he heard himself say softly. "Keep it."

He had no idea why it suddenly mattered so much to him that Logan keep his number in his phonebook. Sure, it could be a practical step for Logan to take, having two Transgenics at Eyes Only's beck and call. That could only be a good thing, right? That had to be the only reason he was wanting it.

Logan tilted his head, obviously confused by Alec's behavior.

Alec shrugged one shoulder and grinned again. "Might come in handy some day. Ya never know when you might need another X5 around." He lifted his beer to his lips, but didn't take a drink. "Might save someone's life."

Logan seemed to consider that for a few seconds before nodding in agreement. "You know, you're right. And you keep mine, too. Because that 'might come in handy' thing works both ways."

Alec raised his glass in mock-salute, and Logan did the same.

"Just don't call me on Friday night. Or Saturday. Most of Sunday's out, too."

Logan took one more swallow from his beer before sitting it back down on the bar and pushing himself away. "Don't worry about your weekends," he said with a smile, clapping Alec lightly on the arm as he stepped away. "I know how you are."

And then Logan was gone. But his absence didn't come with silence, because the voice he'd almost forgotten was suddenly back, echoing through his mind again.

_We know what you are._

Crap.


	2. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

It had been easier than he'd expected to deal with the Steelhead issue, because it had been one of those rare times when ignoring something really did seem to make it go away. He'd just stayed out of Sector Four for the week, which made running into them on accident much less likely, and none of them had come back to Crash since Lux had left Friday night. He'd stopped selling the Andy, but that just made good business sense, like he'd told Max. He'd definitely stopped because Andy killed people, not because he was afraid of stepping on anyone's toes. So he'd stayed out of their way, they'd stayed out of his, and everything had been going just fine.

Until Max had found out that they had Zack with them.

Alec sighed as he slowly made his way over to the bathroom door. He was already moving a lot better than he had been when he'd called in to work that morning, so he knew the injuries he'd received during the rescue were healing. He'd made it back to the long-abandoned and condemned hotel he was currently calling home the night before, and he'd done it with no help from anyone. Of course, he'd fallen right into bed and passed out, and had only woken up long enough to call Normal, but that didn't mean anything. He was still limping a bit from slamming his knees into the pavement from four feet up, but he was fine.

He was less than thrilled at having been forced to put himself back on the Steelheads' radar after he'd just managed to get himself off of it, but he couldn't really blame Max for wanting to save Zack. And he couldn't blame Zack for needing to be saved. After everything that Manticore had done to the guy, it just wasn't fair for him to be turned into some sort of mindless toy soldier for a bunch of petty criminals on the outside.

He reached the bathroom sink and turned the tap on, for once thankful that there was only cold water in the pipes. He leaned his elbows against the front of the vanity and let the water run across his wrists and down his hands, restoring his alertness somewhat as he washed away the last of the dirt from the alley he'd been dropped to face-first.

Alec had been right when he told Max that the next time the Steelheads came after him, they'd be packing. And maybe he was just being touchy, but when they'd run into those two in the alley – and the short one really had gotten that new arm he'd been talking about – they'd been aiming their guns at him, not at Max. So maybe they had saved Zack, and that was great, but Alec would have to start watching his back again. And since he'd never gotten around to telling Max about them the first time, and because she was going to be busy taking care of big brother Zack for the immediate future, he'd have no one to back him up if anything went wrong.

Not that he'd been counting on Max for back-up or anything, because he hadn't. He didn't need her help. He'd always managed just fine on his own, and he didn't see any reason why he wouldn't be able to handle this the same way.

He cupped his hands under the faucet, letting them fill before splashing the cold water on his face. He felt the sweat and grime washing away, taking at least some of his tension with it. After a few handfuls of water, he tossed his head back and looked at himself closely in the mirror.

The bruises on his neck, the perfect imprints of Zack's fingertips, still showed green and yellow against the pale skin of his throat. Even so, they were lighter than they had been before. His throat was still sore, but the swelling had gone down enough that he could finally swallow again. His body was healing itself, the damaged blood vessels repairing themselves with their usual speed. They would fade completely in the next hour or so, and all visible evidence of his near-strangulation would disappear.

The memories of the day before, though, feeling the cold metal of the exoskeleton on Zack's hand squeezing his throat and cutting off his oxygen supply, would linger long after the bruises were gone. The minutes that had passed with his feet dangling in the air, all of his weight suspended from his neck, feeling himself starting to lose his grasp on consciousness... and Max, standing there so calmly, more upset that Zack didn't recognize her than that he was killing Alec. Max dismissing him as unimportant, painting him with the same brush as she did the Steelheads, casually mentioning that he wasn't "in their unit."

Those would stay with him.

He didn't understand why it bothered him so much. In fact, he was fairly certain that it shouldn't bother him at all, but it did. Units were ridiculous things, bad for morale, and made their members too dependent on each other. He hadn't been a member of a unit since he was nine years old, and he couldn't remember a single day that he'd missed the others. He certainly hadn't ever considered them family of any kind, let alone siblings, like Max did.

There were certain lessons that Manticore had taught him that he had learned well.

He was a single soldier and not part of a larger whole. He had no greater purpose; without Manticore to give it to him, he had no purpose at all. He didn't matter to anyone outside of his immediate usefulness to them. He was not irreplaceable. If he failed in his mission, there were a dozen other soldiers waiting for their chance to perform. He had no feelings, and even if he did, they wouldn't matter. He had one job and one job only: do as he was told.

That was the way he'd been raised, and that was the way he wanted it. He'd lost his purpose when Manticore burned to the ground, and he hadn't managed to find a new one yet, but a solitary life was still the one he preferred. The less people in his life the better.

But sometimes, a solitary life just wasn't possible. The life of a normal human seemed to require being surrounded by other people, and if there was one thing Alec knew how to do, it was fit in with his environment. For better or for worse, he had managed to build himself a circle of companions. He didn't know quite enough about them to consider them friends, but they were the people in his life, and when it came to playing normal, they were better than nothing.

So he would finish cleaning himself up and head to Crash, because it's what he did every night. He'd be there for the "Welcome Home" party for Zack that Sketchy had called and told him about. He'd go take part in the celebration of a victory that he'd played a large part in securing but doubted he'd ever be thanked for. Through it all, he'd smile and laugh and play it off like nothing of any importance had happened to him for the past few days.

If only those damn bruises would fade faster, so it would be easier to convince himself that it was true.

* * *

He'd noticed the way Zack looked at her the second he'd walked through the door.

He was willing to admit that he just might be a bit wary of the guy because he'd tried to kill him with his bare hands the day before, but Alec was convinced there was something wrong. Max had told him that all of Zack's memories had returned, but he hadn't reacted to Alec's presence – or his face – at all. He hadn't called him Ben. He hadn't actually called him anything, because he hadn't said a single word to him all night.

But Alec had been watching. He'd seen the looks Zack kept shooting over his shoulder at Max while he was playing foosball with Sketchy. He'd seen the way Zack looked up every time he heard Max's voice. He'd seen the way Zack smiled at her when he thought she wasn't looking. And while he'd seen Max looking at Zack with nothing but sisterly affection, the looks that Zack were giving her were far from brotherly.

He'd thought it would be a good idea to let her know what he was seeing, because it looked to him like she didn't know. He'd thought she would appreciate input from an outsider's perspective. He'd thought she'd thank him.

He'd been wrong about that.

Okay, maybe his delivery hadn't been the greatest, but she'd pushed him into saying it faster than he'd planned. He'd wanted to ease into it, and she'd wanted him to spit it out. So he had. And it hadn't been the least bit graceful.

So she'd told him to stay out of it and called him sick.

"Ya know what, Max? Never mind. I just thought I should give you a heads up."

"Yeah, well next time you think you need to warn me about something, do me a favor and don't." The almost playful tone of voice she'd been using through the whole conversation was still there, but it was starting to get a harder edge to it.

Alec grabbed her arm as she turned away, and she spun back to him with disgust in her eyes. She wanted him away from her. She wanted him gone. That much was obvious. He could give her that, at least for a few minutes. He held his hands up in submission and lowered his head.

"I'll get the beer, okay? You don't want big brother thinking you've wandered off or anything."

She shoved the pitcher into his hands. "Fine," she said as she turned away She shot him a frosty look across her shoulder as she walked toward the back room again. "Try not to get lost."

He shook his head as he watched her walk away, wondering how long he should wait before he tried that conversation again. Something was off about Zack; he wasn't wrong about that. The way he looked at Max, the things he said to her and about her – how did she not notice how not fraternal those were? No, big brother was far from okay, and Alec knew that it was going to cause a problem. He'd just have to make sure he stuck close enough to Max to be there when things went bad, whether she wanted his help or not.

He was still shaking his head slightly as he walked toward the bar. He hadn't expected her to be thrilled with what he had to say, of course, but for some reason he hadn't expected her to be so nasty about it. He put the pitcher down on the bar and raised his hand to get the bartender's attention.

"Can I get a refill?"

Someone bumped into him from the left, hard, and he turned his head. The dark-skinned Steelhead was standing there, looking down at him and smiling. Before Alec could do or say anything, he felt a sharp pain in his lower back.

"Ow!" His hand went to his back automatically, searching out the source of the sudden sting.

"Sorry," he heard a voice say.

He spun around quickly. Standing behind him at the bar, smiling like a cat who'd just eaten a dozen canaries, was the short Steelhead with the new metal arm.

He realized then just how much trouble he was in. The pain in his back had vanished almost as quickly as it had struck, and waves of numbness were starting to spread out from the original location. Had he honestly been so distracted by Max and Zack's issues that he'd let these Steelheads get close enough to dose him with something? He managed to take one step back on legs that were rapidly losing feeling, but he bumped into the Steelhead behind him, and dark hands gripped his upper arms tightly just as his knees started to buckle.

"Careful there," the Steelhead said. "Don't wanna fall down."

He wanted to push away from them, but his body wouldn't respond. He wanted to beat them down like he'd done at the market, but his arms wouldn't move. He wanted to look to the back room and see if Max had noticed anything, but the only part of him that would move was his eyes. He wanted to yell for help, but his tongue wouldn't work.

Alec felt his arms lifted and draped across the shoulders of the Steelheads, but he knew he hadn't put them there, because he couldn't move them by himself. As they dragged him away from the bar and toward the stairs, with his feet trailing on the floor behind him and the Steelheads giving bullshit explanations to the people they passed, he finally got a glimpse of Max and the others. They were all gathered around the table in the back room, all of their focus on Zack, whose focus was undoubtedly solely on Max. They were too busy to pay any attention to what was going on at the bar. They were laughing, joking, celebrating.

And then he was being dragged up the stairs, his feet banging from step to step – and he wondered if they heard that or not – and he couldn't see them anymore.

The drug finally reached his neck, leaving it unable to support the weight of his head, which fell forward until his chin banged against his chest. As they exited the muggy warmth of the bar and emerged into the chill of the early fall evening, his eyelids fluttered closed and the darkness pulled him under.

* * *

Max glanced around the bar as she wondered again where Alec was. He'd been gone a lot longer than he should have been just to get a pitcher of beer. As the minutes ticked by, with neither beer nor Alec showing up, she got irritated. As those minutes grew longer, and O.C. mentioned Alec's absence, too, that irritation gave way to anger. When he'd been gone so long that even Sketchy had noticed, the anger started turning to concern.

"Be right back."

She stood from the table and walked quickly toward the front of the bar. She looked from side to side as she went, checking every corner and every table for Alec's familiar features, but he didn't seem to be anywhere. By the time she reached the bar, her concern was mounting into full-blown worry.

"Hey!" she called to the bartender, who ignored her. She was not in the mood to be messed with, so she took a deep breath and tried again. "I said hey!"

She wasn't entirely surprised when he ignored her again, but she was done wasting her breath on this guy. When he walked past in front of her, her hand shot out, grabbed his collar, and yanked him forward until his face was only inches from hers.

"I'm looking for somebody!"

"Who?" he asked without hesitation.

She'd have smiled at his sudden willingness to help if she hadn't been so worried about Alec. And yes, she was willing to admit to herself that she was worried about him. If he wasn't in real trouble, he'd have hell to pay for making her care.

"Name's Alec. Tall guy, kinda good looking, dark blond hair, green eyes..."

"Black t-shirt and jeans?"

Max nodded quickly. So he'd made it as far as the bar, then. Whatever had happened to him had happened after that. That was information that might come in handy.

"He left," the bartender went on. "Half an hour ago or so."

Max started in surprise. "Wait," she said. Her confusion was evident in her voice. "He left? Just... left?"

The bartender nodded. "Yeah, with a couple of friends."

"Friends?" She knew she was just repeating what the bartender was saying to her, but it didn't make any sense. Alec didn't have any friends; the only people who even remotely qualified to be called that were all sitting in the back room wondering where the hell he was.

The bartender shrugged and straightened up as Max released her hold on his collar. "Well, he left here falling down drunk with his arms around them, so yeah, I'm guessing they were friends. Now, you want anything or not? I got customers waiting."

Max blinked and shook her head, her mind still swirling with questions. "No. I mean, yeah. Gimme a pitcher."

The bartender nodded curtly and moved away to get the beer. As Max watched him fill the pitcher, the worry and concern that she'd been feeling turned back into anger and irritation, partly at herself for having gotten so worried over nothing, but mostly at Alec for making her.

He'd left with his arms around a couple of friends. He'd volunteered to get the beer, and then he'd forgotten about them and had just left with a couple of friends. He'd gone without a word to anyone, he'd left his leather jacket there, and he'd made them worry about him. He'd made her worry about him because he'd just left.

_'Damn him,'_ Max thought as the bartender put the full pitcher down in front of her. _'He's so gonna pay for this one.'_

She felt an arm wrap around her waist and spun in surprise, only relaxing when she saw Zack smiling down at her.

"Everything okay?" he asked.

Max glanced around the bar once more for good measure, as some small part of her argued that Alec wouldn't just leave like that, not without telling someone and definitely not without getting his jacket. It told her that there was something off about what the bartender had said about him. She saw nothing disturbed or out of place, nothing to make her think that the bartender had been anything but honest, but she couldn't shake the feeling that there was more to Alec's sudden leaving than she was hearing. There was something seriously wrong with the image of Alec throwing his arms around anyone, but still, anything was possible.

_'Alec's a big boy,'_ she told herself. _'He can take care of himself.'_

"It's good," she said to Zack. "Alec bailed."

Was she imagining things, or did Zack's smile brighten at that? She really didn't want to think about what Alec had said, just like she didn't want to think about the way Zack had snapped at Logan earlier in the day. Zack was fine; he was just having a bit of trouble adjusting to being back out in the world as himself instead of a Steelhead's favorite toy. That's all it was.

It had to be.

"Let's get back to the others," she said as she picked up the pitcher. Alec was gone, but she was sure he was fine, wherever he was. She had her brother by her side and her friends waiting for her in the back room. There was nothing to worry about. She had a smile on her face by the time she'd turned around.

"They'll start sobering up soon if we don't get this beer to them, and you really don't wanna see that."


	3. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

He couldn't move.

He vaguely remembered having been half-carried/half-dragged to somewhere because his body wasn't working right, but this felt different. He pulled at his arms, and he felt the muscles respond, but they didn't actually move. He tried it with his legs and got the same results. He blamed his brain – still muddled and sluggish from whatever he'd been dosed with – for taking so long to realize that he was tied down.

It only took a few more seconds for him to realize that it wasn't just his wrists and ankles that were restrained. There was a strap across his chest, too, and another across his knees. There was a rag or cloth of some kind in his mouth that was held in place by something tied around his head. He didn't know what he was laying on, but it was flat, hard and cold. And there was a sheet covering him from head to toe.

The rest of the memories of his Friday night, how he'd gone from buying a pitcher of beer at Crash to wherever he was, came crashing back when he heard the voices that were starting to filter through the haze in his brain.

"Hey, Eddy," he heard one of them say, and he thought it sounded like the big black one with the nails sticking out of his forehead. "You think he's got nanocytes inside him like the other one did?"

"Oh!" said another voice excitedly, and that one he knew belonged to the short one with the metal arm. "Let's hook him up to the machine and find out!"

"Yeah," said a third voice. Alec recognized Eddy's British accent immediately. "But first things first. We find soldier boy number one, and then we start tinkering with the both of them."

Alec froze inside and out when he heard those words. "Tinkering" with him and Zack? What the hell did "tinkering" mean?

"If nothing else, we'll have a fresh supply of organs for our friends overseas."

Okay, yeah, that sounded bad. He liked his organs just fine where they were, and he'd really like them to stay there. He started squirming as much as he could, pulling against his restraints even though he knew that doing so was pointless. Even if he could get himself loose – which honestly wasn't happening as sluggish as his muscles still were – where exactly was he going to go?

He thought that now would be a good time for Max to burst through the door and give him a lecture on getting himself captured.

Again.

He couldn't believe that he was in such a mess in the first place. He was getting soft without Manticore, that was his problem. He wasn't keeping up with his training, and his instincts were starting to fade. He'd let himself feel safe at Crash, even though he knew the Steelheads knew about it, even though that was where Lux had threatened him the first time. He'd let himself believe that it was a good place to let his guard down, and he'd let himself be drugged and dragged off by dumb and dumber.

Because he wasn't good enough anymore.

And yeah, now would be a really good time for Max to show up, lecture or no. He had it coming anyway, for being sloppy. And he didn't really care what she said as long as she showed up. The sooner the better.

The self-recriminations stopped as quickly as they'd started, when Eddy pulled away the sheet that covered him. Alec blinked against the almost blindingly bright light from the metal fixture directly above his head, but he was careful to keep a mask of boredom on his face. Eddy reached down and roughly pulled away the rubber tubing that had been holding the gag in place. Alec spit the rag out of his mouth and worked his jaw up and down a few times as he glanced around quickly.

He recognized the room he was in from some of the old movies and television shows that he'd been watching – an embalming room. He was in an embalming room. And he had fuzzy memories of being dragged through a musty old house filled with coffins to get there. It wasn't a far stretch from those facts to the conclusion that he was in what had probably been – once upon a time – a funeral home. That meant that the hard, flat, cold surface that he was tied to was most likely an embalming table, with grooves in the surface to channel the blood away from whatever body was being drained on it.

That did not bode well.

"Don't worry, soldier boy," Eddy said, as though he'd read Alec's thoughts. But he really didn't have to see into his mind, Alec had to admit to himself, because he was pretty sure it had shown on his face. "You're not dead."

"Not yet," the short one piped up from behind him.

"What do you want from me?" Alec asked, though he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer.

"We want our toy soldier back," Eddy said. "Where is he?"

Alec tried to shrug, but the restraints made the movement barely noticeable. "How should I know?" he asked honestly. "I've never even talked to the guy."

Eddy looked down at him, the look on his face one of consideration. He didn't know whether Alec was telling him the truth or not.

"I don't really want to, either," he added. "He tried to kill me, ya know. Doesn't exactly inspire warm fuzzy feelings."

Eddy obviously didn't know what to do with that information. He turned to the other two.

"Was he at the bar alone, Bird?"

Bird shrugged. "Uh... didn't notice. You, Tuck?"

"Nuh uh," Tuck answered with a shake of his head.

Eddy sighed. "Well, what was he doing when you snatched him up?"

"Gettin' a pitcher of beer," Tuck answered.

"Yeah," Bird agreed, bobbing his head up and down.

"Oh, a pitcher?" Eddy turned back to Alec, who tried to shrug again.

"What? I'm a big drinker."

"Oh, shut up." Eddy enforced the order by shoving the rag back into Alec's mouth and pulling the tubing tight around it again. Then he turned back to the other two Steelheads and motioned them toward the far corner of the room. It was obvious to Alec that he wasn't meant to hear what they were discussing over there, which he took to mean they didn't know how sensitive his hearing was. He could hear every word they said, but there was no way he was going to let them know that.

"It could be that our boy was there, too, right under your noses. You check the back room?"

"Didn't know there was one," Bird said. "You, Tuck?"

Alec didn't know what Tuck's answer was, because he didn't say anything, but it was pretty clear that Eddy didn't like it. The next thing Alec heard was Eddy saying, "You twits!" and then the sounds of said twits being smacked. Alec ginned inwardly.

At least he wasn't the only one who knew that Eddy's sidekicks were idiots.

"You're going back there," Eddy continued. "And I'm going with you to make sure you don't screw it up again."

There was the slam of a door, and then Alec was alone.

It took a few seconds for that fact to sink in to Alec's still slightly fuzzy brain. But once he did realize it, he immediately set about trying to figure out how to get out of his restraints.

His left wrist felt like it wasn't secured quite as tightly as the right, so that was the one he focused on first. Once he had that wrist free, he'd be able to release the other one, and then his chest. After that, it would be a matter of seconds to get his legs and ankles free, and then he could make a break for it. He'd be long gone before the three stooges even got to Crash, let alone back from it.

He was paying so much attention to his efforts to free himself that he didn't hear the door open again. He didn't hear the soft footsteps that crossed the floor toward the table he lay on, either. He didn't know anyone was in the room with him until he felt the fingers close around his arm.

Less than a second later, he felt four steel spikes sink themselves into the skin above his elbow. He tried to flinch away, both from them and the voice that accompanied them.

"Hello, pretty," Lux said as she leaned down over him. "I'm so glad you're here."

* * *

The hour and a half that Alec had been gone had passed quickly from Max's perspective, but the words he'd said to her before he left were ringing in her ears loud and clear. Zack's behavior had been growing steadily more and more alarming as the night had gone on, and Max was finding it harder to deny that there was something seriously wrong with her brother. It was obvious that he had his memories back, but some of them, particularly the ones of Logan, seemed to be distorted.

"Where's Logan tonight?" Cindy asked. "He's usually here on Friday."

"He's busy," Max answered evasively, hoping that Zack hadn't heard the question. Logan wasn't really busy that Max knew of; she just hadn't asked him to come. Zack's reaction to him that morning had been less than friendly. In fact, Zack had been downright hateful. She was crossing her fingers that if she kept them apart for a few days, Zack would calm down.

But Zack had heard the question, and he didn't seem pacified by Max's answer.

"I thought he loved you," he said snidely. "What's more important than that?"

"Zack, don't," she almost pleaded.

"Ya know, the last time I saw him, he couldn't keep his hands off you." Zack reached across the table and laid his hand on top of hers. "I guess that's changed?"

Max shook her head. "It's complicated. And I don't wanna talk about it." She really didn't want to talk about it, about the virus she carried. But even if she had wanted to explain it to him, she couldn't. Not at Crash, and not when there was a chance of Sketchy listening in.

"You deserve to be loved, Max," Zack insisted, squeezing her hand tightly with his. "You deserve to be touched, and kissed, and..."

"Outside!" Max ordered abruptly. She jumped to her feet and pulled her hand away.

"Max?" Zack looked sincerely surprised by her reaction.

"Outside, Zack. Now."

Zack stood and walked toward the front door, but the look of confusion never left his face. Max sighed and turned back to the table to tell O.C. and Sketchy good night.

"We're gonna blaze, guys. I'm tired, and I don't think Zack's feeling so great."

"You okay, Boo?" Cindy asked. She knew all about Zack's situation, and she'd obviously noted his strange behavior.

Max nodded, grateful for her friend's support. "Yeah, it'll be fine. He's just still a little confused, I think. See ya at home later?"

"Nah," Cindy answered with a shake of her head. "You two have enough to worry about without Original Cindy gettin' in the way."

"I'll make it up to you, I promise." Max smiled quickly before she turned to leave. She turned back just a second later, though, as another thought occurred to her. "Alec's jacket..."

"Got it, Boo," Cindy answered, holding it up for Max to see. "Gonna give the boy a piece of my mind before I give it back."

"Yeah," Sketchy interjected, his speech slightly slurred. "Skipped out on his turn to buy!" He punctuated his declaration by staggering slightly and catching himself on the table, making the glasses clink into each other loudly. "Whoa."

Max huffed a quick laugh as she turned and hurried toward the front stairs where Zack was waiting for her. The last thing she heard from the back room was Cindy tiredly berating Sketchy. "You're gonna knock the table over, ya big drunk clutz!"

Zack was standing at the bottom of the stairs smiling broadly as Max approached. "Isn't Cindy coming?"

Max shook her head, took Zack by the elbow, and led him up the stairs. "I thought I told you to wait outside."

Zack still looked confused when Max opened the door a bit more forcefully than she needed to and pulled him out into the night behind her.

"I don't understand, Max. What did I do?"

She finally let go of his arm and turned to face him. The words 'Alec was right' were repeating over and over in her head, and she wanted to ignore them, but she couldn't.

"You can't act like that, Zack. You were acting like we're..."

"Like we're what?" he asked, stepping closer to her than she was comfortable with. She shook her head again and stepped away from him.

"Stop it."

"Stop what?" His voice was maddeningly sweet, innocent and... intimate. No, this was wrong. She had to be misunderstanding him. "All those months, Max, with no one to protect you. And I didn't know if you were okay. I don't know what I'd have done if anything had happened to you."

He leaned forward, and it took her longer than it should have to realize what he was doing. Just before his lips brushed hers, she stepped back again.

"Zack..."

"No one's gonna hurt you, Max. I just wanna take care of you. You know that."

And he was leaning forward to kiss her again. She couldn't believe this was happening; she couldn't let this happen.

She punched him.

"Stop that!"

"What's wrong? I love you, Max. I just want things to be the way they were."

"Things were never like that with us," she insisted. "You're my brother!"

"But I remember..."

Suddenly the look in Zack's eyes changed, became glazed and distant. Max didn't know what was going through his mind, but from the different expressions flashing across his face, she thought that none of it could be good. When the dazed look cleared and he snapped back to reality with eyes filled with anger and hatred, she knew that none of it had been.

It had been a long time since she'd seen anyone going through Manticore flashbacks, but now that she was seeing Zack come out of one, she realized exactly what was going on.

"Whatever you're thinking, Zack, you're wrong."

"It's him, isn't it?" Zack said, as though he hadn't heard her at all. She wondered if he really had. "How can you love him and not me, after what he did to you?"

"He didn't do anything," she said as calmly as she could. "Zack, you've got to listen to me."

"He betrayed us! He's a traitor!"

"No!" she insisted, glancing around quickly to make sure that no one was within earshot. "No, they did something to you back at Manticore. Logan is not the enemy."

"I died for you!" Zack cried in despair.

"I know," she answered. "I know you did, and I can never repay you for that. But you've got to listen to me..."

"He did this to me!" He threw his arm up in front of his face, staring at the exo-harness with disgust, then started pulling at the freshly-healed skin on his face without warning. "He's the reason I look like this!"

"Stop it!" Max cried desperately. "Zack, stop!"

But it was too late for Zack to stop. He stood in front of her, looking exactly as he had the day before. Pieces of skin still clung to the metal that covered the damage the bullet had done to Zack's skull the day he'd killed himself to save her life, and the red light where his left eye had been was blinking angrily.

"He's going to pay for what he did to both of us."

"Zack, no!"

She tried to grab his arm as he darted past her, but he was too fast. She turned and ran after him, but had only gone a few steps before she realized that his biosynthetics were giving him a distinct physical advantage; she'd never be able to catch him in time.

"Zack!" she called after him one last time, still clinging to the hope that he'd turn around and come back to her, and be her brother again, even though she knew he wouldn't. He was too far gone now, too tightly in the grip of whatever Manticore had programmed him to believe before she'd destroyed it.

He'd said he was going after Logan, and she had no reason to doubt that he'd do exactly that. She knew of a payphone less than a block away in the other direction, and she ran to it as fast as she could. Maybe if she warned Logan, he'd have time to get out of the apartment and get to safety before Zack got there.

* * *

Eddy pulled the large black car to a stop in front of Crash and climbed out. Bird and Tuck got out, too, and followed him to the door of the bar.

"You two knuckleheads go check that back room," Eddy said.

"What are you gonna do, Eddy?" Bird asked.

"I'm gonna stand right here and watch for soldier boy, in case he gives you the slip on his way out."

Bird and Tuck nodded in unison and walked through the door.

An hour later, they walked out again, as empty-handed as they were empty-headed.

"Closing time," Bird said. "And he's not in there."

"Last person out was that stoner guy we pounded a couple'a weeks ago," Tuck added. "The frail's mule."

Eddy shook his head in frustration. "And you didn't think that maybe he might know where our boy is?"

"We did," Bird said quickly. "But he bolted out the back door as soon as he saw us. Time we got outside, he was gone."

"Get in the car," Eddy growled. "Maybe Lux got the poofter to talk while we were gone."


	4. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

He'd expected to be interrogated about Zack, since they seemed so worried about getting him back. He'd expected to be worked over until he told them where Zack was, and he knew that he was probably just doped up enough for it to work. He'd expected to at least be asked about him, at least once.

He hadn't expected what was actually happening.

"You think someone's coming to save you, soldier boy?"

But he really, really hated it.

"You think anyone cares about the pretty little G.I. Joe doll?"

He really, really needed to get out of there.

Alec blinked against the fog in his brain and forced himself to think. He was still in the embalming room, but Lux had moved him from the table to a metal chair that had been standing in the corner before. He'd wanted to fight his way free when she'd moved him, girl or no, because he had to get out of there. But before she'd untied him, she'd dosed him with something else, something that kept his muscles sluggish but not as unresponsive as whatever Bird had used. Her drugs were messing with his head, too, because he found himself suddenly unable to say no to her, no matter how much he wanted to.

Of course, the fact that she'd sunk those damned spiked nails of hers into the back of his neck, only millimeters from his spine, might have had something to do with his willingness to behave himself, too.

So he was strapped into the armless metal chair with his arms down at his sides. There were restraints around his wrists and elbows, ankles and knees, with one strap around his chest and another around his head. She'd completely destroyed his shirt since he'd been sitting there, slicing through it and leaving it hanging in tattered shreds from his shoulders. She spent her time alternating between walking around in front of him, taunting him, and stabbing him with those spikes at random intervals.

"To make sure you're paying attention," she'd said.

Obviously, she didn't think he was paying enough attention at that point, because she sank the spikes on her right hand into the left side of his chest, curling them underneath his collarbone. He squirmed against the pain, unwilling to cry out and worried about the damage he could do to himself if he moved too much. He'd lost count of how many of those little puncture wounds he had covering his arms, neck and chest.

Lux leaned forward over him, her eyes filled with both lust and malevolence.

"So, who's coming to save you, pretty?" she asked, her voice oozing out of her mouth.

He turned his head away as far as the strap across his forehead would allow and refused to answer her, as he'd been doing for the past who-knew-how-long that he'd been in that chair. He just needed a minute, just to clear his mind and get his head back on straight. He just needed to get control of his own body again, so he could get himself out when Max got there.

Max was coming. He knew she was. Maybe she'd come alone, or maybe she'd bring Zack. Maybe she'd come busting through the door with Logan in his exoskeleton. He really didn't care who she brought with her, as long as she got there before too much longer, because the whole situation was really starting to get to him. But Max was coming.

Lux punished him for his lack of response by moving her hand, ripping through skin and muscle as she dragged her fingers down his chest. He felt the edges of the spikes catching on his collarbone and heard the grinding sound they made, and he couldn't hold back the small cry that passed his lips.

"If they're coming to save you, then where are they?" Lux continued. "If they care so much about you, then why aren't they here?" She stepped back slightly, keeping her nails embedded under his collarbone but tugging against them a bit. He moaned softly, but she didn't stop moving until he felt the insides of her thighs pressing against the outsides of his.

He refused to turn his head back to face her; he refused to answer her. The reward for his disobedience was the flash of spikes emerging from the fingernails on her left hand before sinking into the tender flesh under the ribs on his right side. He bit his lip to keep from crying out again, but a whimper escaped.

Max was coming. He just had to hang in there a little longer, because Max was coming. They'd grabbed him from Crash in front of dozens of witness. She had to know he was missing, and she had to know who'd taken him. Max was coming.

"I think I'll keep you when Eddy's done," Lux said suggestively. She retracted the spikes on her left hand from his ribs, and he felt the sticky wetness running down his stomach in small rivulets, but he ignored it. After so much time alone with this woman, they were far from the only places he was bleeding.

He could remember flirting with Lux once, what seemed like a lifetime ago, and he wondered why he'd ever done that. He hadn't actually been attracted to her, had he? Because he had never wanted to pull away from a woman as much as he wanted to run from her at that moment. But there was nothing he could do as she sat down in his lap and wriggled forward until her lower body was pressed against his. He turned back to face her again, but still refused to speak.

_'Max is coming,' _he told himself again. _'It's almost over. Max is coming.'_

"My own little toy soldier. My own pretty, pretty doll to play with."

She brought the fingers of her left hand to her mouth, touching them with her tongue, tasting the blood that covered them. He wanted to turn his head and look away again, but he couldn't. He was almost frozen in place, his eyes locked on the bizarre sight in front of them.

'_God, Max, where are you?'_

"No one's coming. You know that." If he could just shut out her voice for a few seconds, if he could just concentrate, if he could just ignore her until these drugs got out of his system and he could focus again. She was lying; she had to be lying.

"Max is coming," he whispered. He didn't realize that he'd said it out loud, and he didn't understand the smile that spread across Lux's face.

He did understand what she was doing when she pulled her right hand away from his collarbone, and he felt the pull of the spikes catching on the edges of his bone again. She didn't bother licking her fingers this time, though. She bent forward and pressed her tongue against the open wounds, licking away the blood that oozed from them. She straightened back up, gave him a smile that showed her blood-covered teeth, then wiped away a few of the drops that stuck to her lips with the tips of her fingers.

"Max isn't coming, pretty," she whispered. She took the sides of his head between her hands and held him steady, forcing him to look at her no matter how badly he wanted to look away. She leaned even further forward, until he felt the warm gusts of her breath against the side of his neck and felt her lips touch the tip of his ear.

_'Max is coming. Max is coming. Max is coming.'_

"Max doesn't even know you're gone," Lux whispered into his ear before pulling back slightly and planting her still-bloody lips against his.

One of her hands moved away from his face, and suddenly she was shoving that damned needle into the side of his neck again. He felt his muscles go lax almost immediately. She reached behind his head and pulled on something, and the top of the chair reclined until he was almost flat on his back.

When she started pulling away what remained of his shirt and tugging at the waist of his jeans, he closed his eyes. He was a soldier, an assassin, built to be stronger and faster than any human, but there was nothing he could do to save himself. He'd been taught since childhood how to detach himself when he found himself in a compromised position from which escape was impossible. He'd done it before, and he was good at it. He let himself fade away, let his mind go almost totally blank. Only one thought remained.

_'Max isn't coming.'_

* * *

Max paced up and down the clinic hallway nervously.

What had happened in the parking garage under Fogel Tower would haunt her for weeks, if not longer. Zack had been completely under Manticore's spell, almost as though Renfro herself had reached out from her grave to take her revenge. He'd been determined to kill Logan, and had very nearly succeeded.

She'd been forced to electrocute him, send thousands of volts of electricity surging through her own brother's body, to save Logan's life. She'd thought she'd killed him.

But Dr. Carr had told them that Zack would be fine, that the electricity had erased his memory again, and that he'd be waking up not knowing who he was, but that he'd be all right. Max sincerely hoped that Dr. Carr was right about everything he said. She and Logan had come up with a good plan to get Zack out of Seattle, to keep him safe for the rest of his life, but it depended on him never remembering who he was.

Zack had gone into surgery an hour earlier, for a delicate but completely safe procedure that would remove the exo-harness from his arm. Zack would heal completely in a day or two, and Dr. Carr had decided to keep him sedated until all of his skin had grown back. If everything went according to plan, Zack would wake up believing he'd never been anything but a normal, average – if incredibly strong – human.

All in all, they were making the best of an incredibly bad situation, and she knew that. So why did she have a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach?

"Max?" Logan was sitting on a couch in the waiting room, watching her pace back and forth. "He's going to be okay."

"Oh, I know," she answered. She made herself sit down on the chair across from him and forced her knee to stop bouncing up and down. "I've just got this feeling."

"What kind of feeling?"

"Like there's something wrong," she said distantly. She shook her head and focused on Logan again. "I can't explain it. I don't even know that it's anything to do with Zack. Just... something."

She'd had all the sitting still she could handle. She pushed herself back to her feet and started pacing again.

"Just relax," Logan said calmly. "Whatever it is, I'm sure we'll know about it soon enough. There's no point in getting yourself all worked up over something that hasn't happened yet."

"I know that. I do. It's just..." She stopped her pacing and turned to face Logan from across the room. "I can't shake it. Something really, really bad is going to happen, Logan. I know it. I just don't know what it is."

* * *

Alec wasn't unused to waking up in unfamiliar settings and not remembering how he got there, so that alone wasn't enough to bother him. He had been trained for this, after all, schooled time and again in how to interpret his surroundings and adapt to them in a matter of moments. He was also no stranger to waking up in restraints, feeling as though he were emerging from a drug-induced loss of consciousness. It hadn't been long since he'd woken up exactly like that in the basement at Manticore, when he'd had to convince PsyOps that he wasn't as crazy as his twin brother, the serial killer.

The problem was that in this instance, waking up in restraints, he knew where he was and how he'd gotten there. And he knew that it was most definitely somewhere he did not want to be.

It just wasn't possible for him to do anything about it.

It was a pain in his left arm that had woken him, a sharp, biting pain that told him some sort of needle – a big one, from the feel of it – was being shoved through his skin just above his wrist. He waited for the inevitable numbness to start spreading again, but it didn't. Instead there was a click and a whirr, and the vaguely disturbing and mildly painful sensation of suction against the inside of his vein. Then another sharp stab, another needle, and a rush of cold under his skin. Then both needles were taped into place.

He blinked his eyes slowly, trying to bring himself to full wakefulness so he could take in his surroundings. His jeans were back on and zipped up, which was at least a better situation than he'd been in when Eddy had gotten back. That wasn't a pleasant memory, either Eddy walking in or what was going on when he did, and it wasn't one he'd be revisiting any time soon. Alec honestly didn't know who Eddy had been angrier at, Lux or him.

The bruises he could feel on his face, chest and back – and since when could an Ordinary throw him around like that? – said it was probably him.

He was back on the table again, with the straps back around his ankles, wrists and chest. But this time, they'd gone even further, because his knees and elbows were secured individually, there was an extra strap across his hips, one across his shoulders, and he couldn't move his head. He'd been seriously injured before, so he recognized the feeling of the tube down his throat that was moving oxygen in and out of his lungs. That meant that he couldn't breathe on his own for some reason, but he was at a loss as to why. He also couldn't really move his muscles, though they did respond to him a little bit. He'd obviously been able to open his eyes with some effort, and he was twitching his fingers, hoping to work some muscle control back into the rest of his arm.

He felt Lux's hand on his forehead and wanted to pull away from her, but he couldn't. He turned his eyes toward her as she clucked her tongue at him.

"Poor stubborn pretty. You really don't want to be awake right now."

He didn't know what she meant by that, and he tried to ask her with his eyes, but she wasn't understanding him and he wasn't even sure why he was trying. It wasn't like she was an ally, not after what she'd done to him. Then he felt something pushing down on his lower right side. It didn't really hurt, it was just pressure, but it was hard enough to make his eyes water. Someone else was unbuttoning his jeans, tugging them down over his right hip, but that didn't make any sense. Lux was standing beside him, so who was doing that, and why?

When he looked back at Lux again, her expression had changed. Instead of the cold, taunting look she'd worn since he'd gotten there, she looked almost sad. Regretful? Apologetic? He didn't understand the change in her attitude at all, but he was pretty damn sure he didn't like it.

"You're going to want to hold still," she said. "I mean, I don't know what happens if you move, but I don't think it'll be very good."

"It'll kill him is what it'll do," Eddy said from the other side of the table, and Alec figured out not only who had been pushing on his right side, but why. He also realized that his jeans weren't being pulled off, but just out of someone's way. Words ran through his mind: Eddy telling Bird and Tuck that the boxes were full of livers and kidneys, saying something about "tinkering" with him, talking about having a fresh supply of organs...

Oh, shit.

Eddy leaned forward and waved a scalpel in his face. "Sharp little buggers, these. Figure they can slice clean through an artery if you're not careful. I'm only going for a kidney, but ya never know what I might hit if you're squirmin'."

This couldn't be happening. No, this wasn't real. There was no way he wasn't imagining this. No, no, no.

He felt the smaller, localized pressure of the blade against his skin, and his first instinct was to pull away, but his muscles were useless. Being able to wiggle the tip of a finger wasn't going to help him now. When he felt the knife break the skin, his body wanted to curl up around the pain, but even if he weren't paralyzed, the restraints would have kept him from doing it. He was completely helpless, defenseless, and at the mercy of a petty – and apparently psychotic – thug who really, really hated him.

Lux was right; he didn't want to be awake for this. But he was, and he could feel it, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Eddy started making the incision larger, and Alec could feel every slice through every layer of skin and muscle. The pain had reached a level he'd never felt before, had never even known existed, could never have possibly imagined. It burned with both fire and ice, an indescribable agony that clawed its way along his nerves, leaving him incapable of thinking about anything else. His stomach was roiling and churning, and it took what little focus he had left to keep himself from throwing up. He had a tube down his throat, his lungs weren't responding to him, and if he threw up, he'd drown on his own vomit.

He wanted to run, had never wanted to run so much in his life, but he couldn't. He couldn't move. He couldn't think. He couldn't scream. He couldn't breathe.

He was going to die like this.

Max wasn't coming. No one was coming. No one knew where he was, no one cared where he was, and he was going to die here.

_'Just pass out.'_

But he couldn't. He was alone, and if he passed out there'd be no one on watch, and why did that even matter right now? He was dying!

He felt the cool hand against his face, wiping away tears that he hadn't even realized were falling, and he grabbed on to it with his mind. His vision was gone, and his open eyes saw nothing but a bright blanket of white. His hearing was distorted by a muffled ringing, but he could just make out the cadence and tones of a familiar voice whispering in his ear. It was softer and more soothing that it had ever been before, and he took comfort in its existence even though he didn't really know who it belonged to and he couldn't understand the words.

_'Max... Max, you're here. Get me out of here. Help me, please!'_

The voice slowly sank into his consciousness, and he forced himself to focus on it. The sounds formed words, and he began to understand what it was saying. He latched onto that voice and let it wash over him, grateful to have something other than the pain to ground him, no longer caring who was talking to him, only grateful that someone was there.

"Let go, pretty," the voice said. "Just let go. Stop fighting. It'll all be over soon."

He didn't care who said it; all he knew was that the voice was right. One way or the other, it would all be over soon. Maybe that should have bothered him, but he couldn't really bring himself to care. And maybe it made him weak, but he really didn't want to be around to find out how it ended.

He let his eyes close, let the voice carry him away, and let go.


	5. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

Max walked into Logan's apartment with a sad smile on her face. She considered her encounter with Zack in the hospital hallway to be a victory, but it was a bittersweet one that she worried would haunt for years to come.

"Everything went okay?"

She smiled at Logan as she perched on the arm of the couch in the living room behind him. The decision for Logan to remain behind at the apartment while Max went to see if Zack's amnesia would stick had been mutual. Neither one of them wanted a repeat of what had happened in the parking garage in the early hours of Saturday morning. Even if Max's face had triggered Zack's memories again, they figured they could keep him away from Logan long enough to get him smuggled out of the city.

"Adam Thompson is on his way home to the ranch."

"And he doesn't remember?"

Max shook her head. "No, nothing. I thought he recognized me at first, but he didn't." In fact, Max was fairly sure that he had recognized her, even if he only thought he'd seen her face before. But it had been so easy to convince him that he didn't know her that she wasn't worried about any other memories flooding back to him again.

"So he finally got his wish." Logan's voice was wistful, and Max let the feeling flow through her as she nodded in response. "A normal life," Logan continued.

"A safe one," she answered. She stood and walked toward the office, stopping to lean against the door frame. "White and his dogs'll never find him now."

Logan suddenly looked almost as sad as Max felt, but she knew that those emotions weren't for Zack. "And you're all right with it?"

Max crossed her arms across her chest and her legs at the ankles. "You mean am I okay with never seeing my brother again?"

Logan nodded his confirmation and pushed himself across the office to near where she stood against the door.

"No, of course I'm not. I miss him already, Logan. So much." She shrugged as she looked down at him. "But I guess it's my turn to protect him now."

"Can you do what he did?" Logan asked sincerely and not unkindly. "Can you protect them all?"

Max shook her head. "Not by myself, no." She let a small smile turn up the corners of her lips as she looked back down. "Maybe with a little help, though."

Logan smiled back at her and nodded, obviously pleased with her answer. "I was hoping you'd say that." He turned away from her and pushed himself back to his desk.

"You've got something?" She uncrossed her arms and stood straight, walking across the office as Logan tapped on his keyboard.

"I've got a potential lead on those Steelheads that had Zack."

"What?" If Max's interest in Logan's lead hadn't been complete before, it certainly was after that. "How?"

"I don't think this is going to require your... talents, Max. At least not at first. But I thought you'd be interested in it."

"Are you kidding?" She moved as close to Logan as she dared, positioning herself behind him so that she could see his monitor across his shoulder. "I can't make Manticore pay for what they did to him, but I can kick some Steelhead ass." She leaned forward in eagerness, catching herself just short of putting her hand on his shoulder and pulling back quickly. "So what have you got?"

"You remember when I told you that I'd been tracking them for months, for that black market organ ring they've been running?"

"Yeah."

"One of my informants got an email from British Eddy yesterday." Logan hit the enter button on his keyboard, and an email popped up on the screen. "It's a sales flyer."

"They're moving organs again," Max said with disgust.

"More than that." Logan turned toward her, his expression at once both excited and concerned. "The sale offer is for an organ described as an 'amped-up super kidney.'"

Max let her confusion show on her face. "Super organs?"

Logan nodded, picking up a pencil and threading it through his fingers as he spoke. "Eddy and his gang aren't the smartest bunch, but they do know better than to lie to their customer base. So if they say they're selling a 'super kidney'..."

"It's from a Transgenic," Max finished the thought for him. "Because of Zack, they know what we are."

Logan nodded slowly and continued. "So the next question is – is it Zack's?"

"No," Max answered with a shake of her head. "Dr. Carr said that most of Zack's organs had been replaced with biosynthetics."

"So if it's not Zack's...?"

"Whose is it?"

Logan spun back to his computer again, tapping his pencil against the desk a few times before dropping it and starting to type again. "You don't know of any Transgenics who have gone missing in the past few days, do you?"

Max shook her head slowly as she turned to look out the front windows, at Seattle's distinctive and still impressive skyline. "They've all gone missing, Logan," she answered softly. "It's the only way they know to survive."

"So we set up a buy," Logan said from behind her. "We buy it, have Sam run a few tests, and find out..."

"We'd never know who it was. Our DNA database was destroyed." Max had never thought she would regret the fire that had destroyed Manticore, but at that moment, she did. How much information had been destroyed that could have been vital to their survival? "Buying it would be a waste of money that we might need for something else."

"What about keeping the secret of the Transgenics' existence from getting out?"

"Unless Eddy tells people that he's pulling organs out of genetically engineered soldiers from a secret government program, they'll just think the donor was juiced." Max spun back to face Logan quickly as a thought occurred to her. "But I do want your contact to meet up with them. And I want it to be me."

"Max..."

"No, Logan. They're selling Transgenic organs, and what they did to Zack..." She paused, collected her thoughts and took a deep breath. "I'll get the proof to keep them down your way. But I want to take them down my way first."

Logan had been shaking his head the entire time she'd been talking, and he didn't stop. "They know you. Two of them have seen you. You took Zack away from them, and they're not going to forget about you that easily, no matter how stupid they are." Max inhaled and opened her mouth, but Logan cut her off. "And before you say it, Alec's out, too. He was with you when you saved Zack, right?"

Max nodded reluctantly. "They knew him before that, anyway."

Logan's eyebrows raised in surprised curiosity, but he didn't say anything.

"So what do I do?" Max asked with a sigh.

"Go to work, Max. Treat it just like any other Monday afternoon. I'll contact my informant and have him arrange a meeting with them tonight. Hopefully, he'll be able to get me enough information that I can trace them back to their hangout. Once I've got that, I'll probably need you and Alec to go snoop around for me. Quietly," he added quickly. "No bickering."

Max rolled her eyes. "I'll try. But no promises." She flashed another smile in his direction and turned to leave. "Thanks, Logan," she said. "For everything."

"You're welcome, Max."

The elevator doors dinged as they closed behind her, and Logan turned back to his computer once more.

* * *

The first thing Max noticed when she walked in to JamPony was that Normal had apparently gotten over whatever fear Original Cindy had instilled in him the week before, because he was already yelling at her across the counter about being late. She ignored his words, brushed him off with a wave of her hand, and kept walking down the ramp.

The second thing she noticed was that O.C. and Sketchy were both hovering around her locker waiting for her to get there. Cindy, of course, knew the whole story on Zack. Sketchy only knew a few sanitized pieces of it, along with whatever Cindy had come up with to explain Zack's sudden 'illness.' But it was obvious that both of them were waiting for her and wanting to know how Zack was.

Remembering that Zack was headed for the life he'd always wanted – that he'd always deserved – Max forced a smile on to her face. She'd almost worked up to greeting them semi-cheerfully when Sketchy saw her across O.C.'s shoulder. He gestured to Cindy, who turned to face Max as she walked up to them.

"How is he, Boo?"

"How's Zack doin'?"

"He's fine," she said, answering both questions at once. She didn't know exactly what O.C. had told Sketchy about what was wrong with Zack, but she knew enough to feel safe in continuing with the story she'd thought up on her way over from Logan's. "The doc says he's gonna be fine, but thinks he'll get better faster in the mountains. Something about thin air being easier on his lungs or something." Silently, she sent O.C. a message that she had more to say, and Cindy's expression confirmed that she understood.

"Poor guy," Sketchy said, completely oblivious to the wordless conversation going on between the two women next to him. "I mean, he just gets home, and he gets electrocuted in a freak elevator accident..."

Sketchy kept talking, but Max's attention wandered to Cindy, who was darting glances around the room as though she was searching for someone. Max looked, too, out of pure instinct, even though she had no idea who she was looking for.

"I mean, just the weirdness, ya know..."

"Where's yer boy, Boo?" Cindy asked, glancing around the room once more.

Max tilted her head in confusion. "I just told you, he..."

"Not Zack," Cindy interrupted. "Alec."

Max huffed in irritation and stepped around Cindy to get to her locker. She'd forgotten how angry she'd been at Alec the last time she'd seen him, but Cindy mentioning him brought it all back. She wasn't going to let herself think about the fact that he'd been right about Zack. She wasn't going to admit that if she'd listened to him, she might have been able to keep Logan and Zack both from being hurt, or that if she'd listened to Alec instead of yelling at him, she might have been able to keep Zack with her.

"He's not my 'boy,'" she answered hotly as she pulled her locker open. "And I don't know where he is."

"When's last time ya saw him?"

Even with all the irritation and anger she was feeling at that second, something in Cindy's tone of voice made Max drop the gloves she'd just picked up and turn back around. "Friday night, when he skipped out on the beer."

Cindy was worried, and Cindy didn't get worried over nothing. Max looked around JamPony once more, hoping to see the familiar dark blond hair and green eyes. But Alec wasn't there.

"He hasn't called Normal, either," Cindy added. "He's been asking everybody if we've seen him, and no one has. No one knows where he is. He's just not here."

"When'd you see him?" Max asked, her voice low. She was at a loss to explain the sudden sense of dread that was taking hold of her. A voice in the back of her mind was whispering to her, over and over, making her listen to it. She was putting one and one and one together, and she didn't like the three that kept turning up.

"Friday night, same as you. Sketchy, you see Alec since Friday?"

"No," Sketch answered with an abrupt shake of his head.

Max could read it in his eyes, that look that said he knew more than he was saying, but he didn't know if it was important, so he wasn't going to say anything. There was a healthy dose of fear in his eyes, too, and considering the last conversation he and Max had had about Alec, she couldn't really blame him. But she didn't have time to play with Sketchy right now. Her every instinct was screaming at her that something was wrong. That feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach was back with a vengeance, something was terribly wrong, and Sketchy might be the only one who knew exactly what that was.

"Spill!" she ordered.

"Steelheads!"

Max froze for a fraction of a second, long enough for Cindy to notice but no one else, and then she adopted a demeanor of pure malice. Her face hardened and her eyes narrowed, and before she realized she was moving she was stalking toward Sketchy, who was already backing away.

"What about Steelheads?" Max asked, every word dripping with venom.

"I didn't do anything!" Sketchy protested, his eyes wide in panic. He bumped the back of his leg on the bench between the rows of lockers, stumbling before catching himself and continuing to back away. "I don't know why they were there, Max, I swear!"

Sketchy jumped when his back hit the locker behind him, and he realized he had nowhere else to go. Max continued to move forward, not stopping until she was standing toe-to-toe with him, glaring up into his eyes.

"Why who was where?"

"At Crash," he stammered. "The Steelheads."

"There were Steelheads at Crash?"

Sketchy's head bobbed up and down frantically.

"When?"

"Friday night. After Alec left."

Max had known, had known from the very beginning, what Sketchy was going to say, but hearing him say it was a completely different story. The words hit her like a physical punch to the gut, stealing the air from her lungs, and she wondered if she looked as pale as she suddenly felt. From the confusion in Sketchy's eyes and the feeling of Cindy's hand gripping her arm, she guessed that she probably did.

"What's wrong?" Cindy asked.

"I swear, Max," Sketchy continued on. "I don't know why they were there. They were out front, looked like they were waiting for someone. There were three – the two that pulped me and another one. But everyone was already gone, so I just went out the back. And I didn't think about 'em again until just now."

Max pulled her arm away from Cindy and walked back toward the front door as quickly as she dared. She knew that she was walking right past the closest payphone, but she also knew that she couldn't use it. The phone call she needed to make had to be private.

She thought she heard O.C. calling out from behind her, and Normal yelling something about docking her pay, but she ignored them both. Her mind was swirling with thoughts of Steelheads, Transgenic organs, and a man who hadn't been seen in almost three days. One and one and one still equaled three, but now she couldn't deny it.

As soon as she was out of sight of JamPony, she blurred to the next nearest payphone, two blocks away. Her hands were shaking as she dialed, and she bounced her knee as she waited for the person on the other end to pick up. When he did, she didn't even wait for him to say hello.

"It's Alec!" she blurted into the telephone. "The missing Transgenic, the kidney, the... Logan, the Steelheads took Alec!"

* * *

It had taken Logan longer to calm Max down enough to tell him what she'd learned than it actually took her to say it. The Steelheads had taken Alec from Crash on Friday night – under her nose, she'd been sure to point out, on her watch – and Sketchy had seen them afterward. No one had seen Alec since then, and now those same Steelheads were selling a Transgenic kidney on the black market.

Logan had agreed with her conclusions with no hesitation, because there really were no other interpretations that would make as much sense. He had made Max promise to go no further than Crash without him before hanging up the phone, strapping on the newly-repaired exoskeleton, and getting in his car.

Max had been insistent about starting the search immediately, at the scene of the abduction. Logan wanted to think of it as the "alleged" abduction, because part of him was still hoping that Alec hadn't been taken, that he was holed up somewhere sleeping off a long weekend, that he was perfectly fine, safe, and all of his organs were where they belonged.

Even so, Logan was a realist, and he had to admit that Alec was in real trouble this time, arguably more trouble than he'd been in since Ames White had captured him. And Max was livid. Crimes against Transgenics upset her even when she didn't know the people involved. Now, the same group of people who had forced her brother to become a common criminal had taken Alec and were parting him out like a used car, selling pieces of him to the highest bidder.

Logan pushed his foot down on the accelerator and drove faster.


	6. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

Max hadn't been sure, at first, that asking Joshua to help find Alec was a good idea. The last she'd talked to him about it, Joshua had still been plenty mad at Alec for attacking and trying to kill them in the empty lot all those weeks ago. She didn't know if he'd even care that Alec had been kidnapped, or if he'd decide that it wasn't his problem and that Alec was getting what he deserved.

She'd been more than mildly surprised when he'd stood up out of his chair and headed for the front door.

"Father's children are a family. Alec is like a little brother. Loud, annoying little brother. Nobody can steal Joshua's little brother."

If Logan had been at all shocked to see Joshua standing outside of Crash, wearing a jacket with the hood pulled down across his face, he hid it well. Introductions were short, because the seriousness of the situation didn't allow them to be anything else.

Max handed Joshua Alec's jacket. She'd called Cindy in a panic and explained what was going on, after she'd talked to Logan. Cindy hadn't even questioned her when she'd asked where Alec's jacket was; she'd just told her that she'd dropped it at the apartment. It hadn't taken Max more than a few minutes to run home and pick it up.

Joshua buried his nose in the leather and inhaled deeply, letting his sensitive nose absorb Alec's scent.

Logan pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and scrolled down his contact list. "Give me a minute," he said.

"What are you doing?"

"Checking something," he said. "Before we get into this, let's just double-check and make sure we're not overreacting."

Logan pressed his phone to his ear.

Max jumped when she heard the phone that started ringing behind her.

Logan turned toward the sound, which seemed to be coming from near Crash's door, and walked in that direction. He didn't hang up, and the other phone kept ringing. He bent down and picked it up, looked at the screen, then snapped his own phone shut.

"Okay," he admitted. "Now we can do this your way."

He dropped the phone in her hand as he walked by, being careful not to let their skin brush. She looked down at the display on the front of the phone and sighed. If she hadn't already known it was Alec's phone, the fact that the screen said _Missed Call: Logan_ would have been convincing on its own. She sighed and flipped the phone open, and found herself surprised by what she found when she looked through Alec's contact list.

Logan's was the only name on it.

Joshua appeared in front of her suddenly, handing her back Alec's jacket. Then he sniffed at the air experimentally, and started walking. Max tucked Alec's phone into the pocket of his jacket, then tossed them both under the front seat of Logan's car. She pushed the button for the lock before closing the door and motioning for Logan to follow Joshua.

They stayed back a few feet, giving Joshua room and letting him concentrate on what he was doing. Max was worried that this wasn't going to work, that if the Steelheads had put Alec in a car and driven away with him that Joshua wasn't going to be able to follow them. But it looked like Sandeman had made Joshua's nose even more sensitive than an ordinary dog's, because he'd already crossed the street and was walking down the sidewalk on the other side, and he was showing no signs of having lost the trail.

"Are you sure this is a good idea, Max?" she heard Logan ask beside her. "What if someone sees him?"

Max sighed and looked around. Part of her knew that Logan was right. If anyone saw Joshua out there, the results would be catastrophic, especially so soon after the incident with Isaac. But she also knew that they had no other choice. Logan had been trying to find the Steelheads' hangout for months and hadn't been able to. No one seemed to know where they actually went when they weren't out causing trouble.

Joshua was Alec's only hope of being found.

"It's getting dark," she answered. "We have to do this, Logan. Joshua's the only chance we've got." She turned to stare straight ahead before mumbling, "He's the only chance Alec's got."

They did have to leave street level and go into the sewers to get past the sector cops at the checkpoint, but Joshua had picked up the scent again on the other side. By that point, it was completely dark, and only the faint glow of streetlights lit their way.

Joshua stopped suddenly in the middle of the street, sniffing the air around him. Had they come this far only for him to lose the trail now?

"Alec," Joshua said, a low growl in his throat. He turned his head slowly and glared at the building across the street from them.

It was a large, old house, Max could see. There was some sort of sign in front of it that she couldn't read from where she stood, but she could see the coffins that "decorated" the yard around it.

"He's in there?" she asked, and Joshua nodded. "You're sure?"

"Scent is strong," Joshua said. "Alec here."

"Okay," Max said. "There should be three of them, right? That's easy enough to take care of. Joshua, you take the..."

"Max," Logan said. She turned to look at him and saw him waving his cell phone at her. "Step back into the shadows. Let me take care of this."

"You're gonna what?" she asked, but she did step into the shadows behind a tree next to the sidewalk. "How are you gonna take on three Steelheads?"

"I'm not taking them on," he answered as he pressed the phone to his ear. "I'm getting them out of the way." He turned his full attention to his phone then. "Hey, Rob, it's Logan. You set up that thing we were talking about, right?" Max assumed this Rob person answered yes, because Logan nodded his head. "Okay, great. I need you to call him and tell him to come to the meeting right now. No, I can't tell you why, I just need you to. Yeah, that would be great. Thanks, Rob."

Max looked up at Joshua in the shadows at her side, and then back at Logan. "What did you...?"

"Just watch," Logan said.

It was only a matter of minutes before Eddy and his henchmen came out of the house, along with a Steelhead girl that none of them had expected. So there were four of them, then, not three. Max thought she recognized the girl from Crash a couple of weeks before, could swear she'd seen her there flirting with Alec.

The four of them climbed into the black car sitting in the front yard and drove away. As soon as they were out of sight, Max motioned for Joshua to cross the street. She followed a few steps behind with Logan.

"So Rob is your contact?"

Logan nodded. "Yeah. With any luck, we'll have Alec's kidney back within the hour. We'll have to see if Sam can put it back in for him."

"First we have to see if there's someone to put it back in to," Max muttered as she finally caught sight of what the sign in front of the house said – _Miller Funeral Home_.

"Don't think like that, Max," Logan said. "We'll find him, and Sam'll patch him up if he needs to. He's a Transgenic, isn't he? Rapid healing, hyper-immune system? He'll be fine."

Max only nodded.

Joshua had reached the front door of the house. He didn't wait for Max and Logan, didn't even bother to glance at them. He just turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped inside.

Max and Logan jogged to catch up with him, and Logan closed the door behind them.

Joshua sniffed at the air intently; Max could tell from the look of concentration on his face that he'd definitely picked up a scent. He walked through the living room, which was "decorated" with more coffins than the front yard was, and into a dining room. When he stepped toward the metal door in the far wall, she followed him wordlessly and motioned for Logan to do the same.

Joshua's sniffing increased in intensity as he neared the door, and Max felt her heart speed up. "Smell Alec," Joshua said. He moved his hand toward the doorknob, but stopped before he actually touched it. The sound of his sniffs turned into a low growl, deep in his throat.

"Smell too much Alec."

Max looked up at him from where she stood at his side, her head tilted and her eyes wide in confusion. "What?"

"Too much," Joshua repeated. "Too much Alec."

Max and Logan exchanged worried, questioning looks behind Joshua's back as Joshua lowered his hand away from the handle. Max didn't understand what "too much Alec" meant, not in the context of what Joshua was saying, but Joshua's behavior was making it obvious that it wasn't good. He'd definitely picked up Alec's scent behind that door, but something was making him not want to open it.

Max placed a gentle hand on Joshua's arm and reached past him, wrapping her fingers around the door handle carefully. Her heart pounded in her throat as she turned it.

As she slowly pushed it open and her eyes widened in horror, she understood what "too much" meant.

"Is this...?" she swallowed audibly, almost afraid to ask the question only because she feared she already knew the answer.

Logan seemed to understand what she was feeling, because he spoke up behind her, saving her from being the one to ask.

"Is it all his?"

Joshua sniffed again, the growl in his throat a constant, low rumble beneath his voice. "All Alec."

The room they'd just opened had obviously at one time served as the funeral home's embalming room, but it appeared to have been converted into a sloppily constructed operating room. Surgical instruments that Max couldn't imagine having ever been clean – to say nothing of sterile – were scattered around the room. Empty IV bags littered the floor. Filthy sheets were piled in the corners and draped over tables and other unidentified apparatus. In the middle of the room, on a raised section of grated floor, stood a metal table that was much larger than the ones that lined the walls. It had grooves that ran the length of it and emptied into a sink at one end, and it was crossed by several leather straps whose purpose was immediately evident to her. Next to it stood a red machine that she couldn't identify, with tubes and wires running out of it.

And blood covered everything.

The surgical instruments were coated with it; the IV bags were splattered with it; the sheets were soaked in it. The table in the center stood over a pool of it that had drained through the grate in the floor, and both the grooves in the table's surface and the sink had bits of it sticking to their edges.

"My God," Max breathed, though walking into that room made her seriously doubt the existence of such a creature. "What did they do to him?"

Joshua hadn't entered the room at all and looked to Max as though he was physically unable to. The scent of copper in the air was so thick that Max almost was almost choking on it; she could only imagine how it was overwhelming Joshua's sensitive nose. Logan had the advantage, in this instance, of normal human senses, and he'd managed to make himself move further into the room than even Max had been able. He was inspecting the leather straps attached to the table's surface, as though he hadn't immediately known what they were.

When he looked up at her and their eyes met across the room, the look of sadness and horror in his eyes almost made her want to run. Maybe Logan hadn't recognized them immediately. Maybe he hadn't seen restraints exactly like those as many times as she had. She envied him that lack of knowledge.

"What?" she asked.

"Restraints," he answered, his voice so quiet that Max might not have heard if not for her enhanced hearing.

She nodded her head slowly. "I know."

Logan looked past her, at the open door. "Where's Joshua?"

Max turned and looked behind her, both surprised and not to see that Joshua was no longer standing there. "I don't know," she said. She turned back around and stepped further into the room. The smell was still powerful, but she was getting used to it.

She was almost afraid to touch anything, like it would make the whole thing more real or more horrible if she did. But that wasn't possible, was it? This was so terribly bad, and there wasn't anything that could have made it any worse. She just stood there, slowly turning in the middle of the room, keeping her hands at her sides. The blood, so much blood, Alec's blood... and it was everywhere.

How the hell had he possibly survived this?

She heard the sound from a long way off – a low keening wail that rose to an almost ear-splitting crescendo before falling off, only to rise again. It was an animal's howl of pain, fear, and sorrow. It was a friend's cry of loss.

It was Joshua.

Max was running from the room, Logan following closely on her heels, before she had even fully realized why. Her heart pounded in her chest, not from exertion but from emotion, from apprehension. There was only one reason for Joshua to make that sound, in this place, at this time.

He'd found Alec.

She and Logan raced through the parlor, past the coffins, looking in open side doors as they passed. Joshua's voice echoed all around them, coming from above, below and both sides all at once. Max could tell from the way Logan followed her that he was uncertain exactly where the sound was originating, but Max knew. The echo was caused by the voice bouncing against the walls of the ductwork; Joshua's cries were traveling through the vents.

"He's in the basement," she explained quickly, as she rushed through the kitchen. "We have to find a way down." She pulled open the door on the far side of the room and was rewarded with a dark set of stairs. As she started down them, she heard Logan behind her.

"Why did Joshua go to the basement?"

"He must have followed Alec's scent," she answered as her feet his the floor at the bottom of the stairs. "Now that we're away from that room, I can smell it, too. But it's... " Her voice trailed off with her footsteps, and Logan had to stop himself on the bottom step to keep from walking into her. There wasn't much room to navigate in the narrow hallway they'd stepped down into, and even less light to see by. The passageway went in two directions, and Max stood at the junction where they met the stairs, looking completely uncertain of which way to go.

"What is it?" he asked worriedly. He stepped around her, keeping his hands to the side, barely resisting the urge to grab her shoulders to steady her. "Max, what?"

"Alec's scent," she said. She closed her eyes and shook her head in confusion. "I can smell him, but it's wrong." She opened her eyes again, looking directly into Logan's. "Oh, Logan, something's wrong."

"Of course something's wrong," he answered shortly. "That blood wouldn't be there if everything were all right."

"He smells... " She closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to pin down not only exactly what was off about Alec's scent but also which direction it was coming from. "Sweet," she finally said. "Overly sweet, like rotting fruit."

"Like he's sick?" Logan asked.

"No," she answered softly. She opened her eyes and turned to her left, heading down the narrow hallway with determination. "No, not sick. Worse than that."

She could hear Joshua's voice getting louder and knew that she'd picked the right direction. There were closed doors off both sides of the hallway, but she didn't spare them a second of thought. She would find Alec when she found Joshua, and until those two things happened, she couldn't think of anything else.

There it was, at the very end of the hall, right under one of the few bare bulbs that lit the hallway – an open door. She ran the last few feet to it, grabbed the door frame and pivoted around it. And stopped in her tracks.

"Oh, God," she whispered. "Alec."


	7. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

Joshua was holding him against his chest, gently but with such obvious strength that Max knew even she would be hard-pressed to take him away. She didn't think Joshua had even realized she and Logan had arrived, because his attention was on Alec. Alec, who was lying so still in Joshua's arms, his head hanging back over Joshua's arm, his arms hanging limp at his sides. Joshua had folded himself almost in half and had his forehead pressed against Alec's chest.

Despite the howling and crying, Alec wasn't responding at all.

She heard Logan entering the room behind her, heard his gasp of shock, and turned toward him slowly. There were no words they could give each other that would make the scene they'd just walked in on any less horrific, but the look in his eyes, a look she knew was reflected in her own, expressed everything he was thinking.

The room was lit only by another single bare bulb that hung from the ceiling, a light so weak that it didn't even manage to chase the shadows out of the corners. It had two rough stone walls, two block walls, and a dirt floor. It smelled of mold, decay, and rot. It smelled of disease and filth. It smelled of a hundred years of death.

Alec was lying right in the middle of it, and she was having a hard time believing that he hadn't already become one of the dead that the room reeked of.

His shirt was gone, and he was barefoot. His jeans were caked with dirt, and so much blood that shouldn't have been obvious but was, and a hundred other things that she didn't even want to think about. A chain around his right ankle and padlocked in place secured him to some sort of stake that had been driven into the floor. His skin was deathly pale, his cheeks were flushed, and his hair was soaked with sweat. She knew he'd only been missing for three days – three days when no one had looked for him, no one had even realized he was gone – but he looked like he'd been there for weeks.

A large, hastily and sloppily-applied bandage covered his entire right side, from the bottom of his ribs to under the waist of his jeans, from his back to his navel. It had been soaked-through with blood, some old and dark and some so bright that it had to be fresh. Max wondered if Joshua had reopened whatever wound was under that bandage when he'd lifted Alec up from the floor. She wondered if Alec had even felt it.

It wasn't the blood on the bandage that scared her, though, because she'd been expecting that; there was too much blood in the room upstairs for him to not have been bleeding from somewhere. No, what worried her the most was the dark yellow substance that spread out beyond it, soaking the bandage to the point of saturation, and starting to seep out underneath it. She could see where streaks of it had dried on Alec's skin, see the angry red lines that poked out from under the edges of the gauze.

It was infected, and badly. That was what she had smelled from the bottom of the stairs.

She'd spent so long frozen in place, staring at Alec in horror, that she hadn't noticed when Logan had started to move forward. She didn't see him kneeling down across from Joshua, didn't see him reaching a hesitant hand toward Alec's neck until it was almost too late.

"Logan, no!" she called out in warning.

Joshua's head snapped up and he snarled at Logan in hatred, barring his teeth and growling again. Logan pulled his hand back so fast that he lost his balance and landed hard on the ground behind him.

Max shook herself out of the shock that had taken control of her and stepped forward. "Joshua," she said softly. "Joshua, stop. It's Logan. He's our friend, remember? He's here to help."

"He is not us!" Joshua roared. "He is upstairs people! Upstairs people hurt Alec!"

"I know," she said softly as she knelt down across from him, taking over the spot Logan had been forced to vacate. "I know they did, Joshua, but Logan won't. Logan is a good man, and he's Alec's friend." She didn't care if that was true or not, though she had a feeling that it was. "He won't hurt him."

She was close enough to Alec that she should have been able to hear him breathing, but she couldn't. She reached out to him, her hand trembling as she placed her fingers against his neck and pressed down. At first there was nothing, and she closed her eyes.

Late. They were too late.

But wait... there was something. It was faint, so faint that she'd missed it at first, and erratic, but it was there. Her head snapped up and she spun to face Logan, determination replacing fear.

"He's alive," she announced. "We have to get him out of here."

Logan pushed himself to his feet and walked past her, then crouched down by Alec's feet to inspect the chain around his ankle. Max didn't move from where she knelt, her hand now resting against Alec's chest, feeling the small movements it made as Alec breathed in and out.

_'Alive_,' she told herself. '_He's still alive.'_

She turned to look at the chain, too. It was thin, like the ones she'd seen people put on their dogs, and it was attached to the same kind of stake the she'd seen those chains hooked to. Anger and hatred spiked through her, and she had to swallow the bile that swelled up from her stomach.

They'd chained him up like a dog, in a filthy, stinking room with a dirt floor, with an open, festering wound in his side. They'd treated him like some sort of animal.

"His feet are cut," Logan said. He glanced around the room quickly. "They're cut deep, like he's been walking on broken glass or sharp rocks."

Max looked back down at Alec's too-pale and too-still face. Even with all this activity around him, he still hadn't stirred.

"He tried to run," she said, and she knew with certainty that was exactly what had happened. "That's why they chained him up. He tried to escape."

_'Because you weren't here to save him.'_

She shook her head again and pushed the self-recrimination away to be dealt with later. It wasn't that she didn't think she deserved it. She just didn't have time for it, and neither did Alec.

"Joshua," she said. "I need you to pull that stake out of the ground so we can get Alec out of here. Will you let Logan hold him while you do that?"

Joshua seemed to consider it, but only for a second. Then he nodded his head. "Logan take care of Alec."

Logan stepped up beside Joshua and knelt on the ground at his side. Transferring Alec from Joshua's arms to Logan's wasn't difficult, but it was slightly awkward, and Alec's right arm flopped around and thumped limply against the floor.

Max took his wrist in her hand and started to put it across his chest carefully, but when she saw the skin, she stopped. His arm was covered in small puncture wounds, all of which had streaks of blood dried around them. Her eyes continued up his arm, across his shoulder, then down his chest. Everywhere she looked, she found more of them.

"They tortured him," she whispered. When she looked up at Logan, she knew there were tears in her eyes, but she didn't care. "Why would they do that?"

"Knowing them?" Logan didn't look like he really wanted to answer her, but she knew that he respected her enough to tell her the truth anyway. "Probably for fun."

Max had never wanted to kill any Ordinary as badly as she wanted to kill those four at that moment, but she bit her tongue and said nothing.

Logan shifted Alec slightly in his arms and moved his feet so that at least some of Alec's weight rested on his legs. Then he moved his left hand, which had been supporting Alec's right side, and pressed it against his cheek instead.

"Alec?" he said softly as he tapped Alec on the face lightly. "Can you hear me? Alec?"

Logan glanced up at Max, and she shook her head slowly. Alec hadn't stirred when Joshua had been howling in his face; no way would he respond to someone as quiet as Logan was being. Logan's eyes narrowed and his eyebrows lowered as he turned his attention back to Alec.

First, Logan flipped his hand around so that it was the back of his hand resting against Alec's cheek. Then he pulled his hand away from Alec's face entirely and pressed it against his chest. When he leaned down and pressed his lips to Alec's forehead, Max couldn't contain her confusion anymore.

"What are you doing?"

"He's burning up," Logan explained. "Sometimes I can make a pretty decent estimate of how high a fever is, but your bodies run so much hotter than mine..."

"Hold Alec still."

Logan shifted again. His right arm was already behind Alec's shoulders, and he put his left hand against the side of Alec's face again. He was holding Alec as tightly against his chest and shoulder as he could, carefully avoiding the bandage, not wanting to cause him anymore pain. Max moved to her right slightly, put one hand on Alec's knee and the other on his ankle, just above the chain, to keep his leg from moving. She glanced back to Logan for confirmation that he was ready, and he nodded at her.

"Go, " she told Joshua.

It took him a few good pulls, but Joshua managed to get the stake out of the ground. The movement yanked against the chain, digging it deeper into the skin of Alec's leg, and Max could see fresh blood running down his ankle. But even that didn't get a response; Alec still lay there, limp and frail and broken in Logan's arms.

Joshua moved quickly to kneel at Alec's left side again. Logan shifted his position enough to hold Alec up while Joshua slid his left arm under Alec's knees carefully, and his right arm under his back. Max picked up the stake and put it in Joshua's hand, so he could hold it up and out of his way. Logan settled Alec's head against Joshua's chest, then pushed himself to his feet and out of the way.

Joshua stood slowly and carefully, obviously mindful of just how important his responsibility was. He adjusted Alec's weight in his arms ever-so-slightly, but it was enough to throw off his balance. Joshua stepped back to keep himself from toppling over, and Alec's right arm and head fell back over Joshua's arm and dangled there, lifelessly.

Max couldn't help the gasp that escaped her at the sight, and neither could Logan. But it was Logan who moved first.

Very gently, Logan took Alec's head in his hands and lifted until he was laying Alec back against Joshua, tucked in against his neck. He did the same with Alec's arm, carefully placing it across his chest. Joshua wrapped his right hand around Alec's upper arm to keep it from falling loose again.

"Gotta blaze," Joshua said.

Max nodded and turned on her heel. She stopped in the door just long enough to look up and down the hallway, checking for exits. There was one only a few feet away, at the end of the corridor on the right, and she turned toward it. She pushed the door open and looked down when she heard a strange crunching sound under her feet. She closed her eyes briefly, then glanced back at Logan, who was following Joshua out of the room.

"Broken glass," she said.

Logan didn't answer, just shook his head sadly. This was where Alec's escape attempt had ended, then, less than ten feet from where it had started.

Max still didn't understand how they'd known he was running. Even weak, even injured, even running barefoot on broken glass, Alec still wouldn't have made a sound.

She got her answer when she reached the top of the concrete steps and pushed the bulkhead door open, and an alarm started blaring.

"Damn it!" she said as she stepped outside quickly. "Faster, Joshua. We gotta move." She held the bulkhead open as Joshua emerged with Alec in his arms, with Logan following close behind them.

The three of them sank into the shadows and ran from the house as quickly as they could. They were three blocks away, in a stand of trees in a park, when Logan called for Max to stop.

"What?" she demanded, turning to face him. "We have to keep moving. We've got to get him to Dr. Carr."

"I know that, Max," Logan said calmly. "But he's not gonna make it if we keep bouncing him around like this." He reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys. "You make a run for it, back to Crash. Get the car and bring it back here."

"No! What if he...?"

"You run a lot faster than I do," Logan pointed out. "And if something happens and we need to move again, Joshua's the only one who can carry him."

She knew he was right, knew that getting the car would get Alec to help sooner, and with a lot less jostling and exposure to less contamination, than Joshua carrying him through the sewers.

"We've got him, Max. Go."

She nodded her head quickly and blurred away.

* * *

Logan turned back to Joshua and Alec, running his hand through his hair as he did.

"Where Max go?"

"She's going to get my car," Logan answered. "We're going to wait for her here, for as long as we can. If those Steelheads get back before she does, though, we might have to move."

"Steelheads come here," Joshua growled, "they not go anywhere again."

Logan nodded his head, because there wasn't any way he could argue with that. And he didn't think he would even if he could have.

"Okay, let's get him settled for a while," Logan said. He helped Joshua lower Alec to the ground, and helped him sit on the ground with Alec's upper back against his chest. Then Logan stood and took off his jacket.

"Wrap this around him," he said as he handed it to Joshua. It was chilly now that night had fallen, and there was a constant mist in the air. Alec was already shivering from cold, which his fever would only intensify, and the last thing he needed was to get any sicker than he was. "We'll be able to warm him up easier in the car, but that should help a bit, at least."

Joshua took off his own jacket and laid it across Alec's chest. Then he looked at Logan, who was settling to the ground beside them.

"Logan is upstairs people," Joshua said.

Logan nodded his head sadly. "I know. And I'm so sor..."

"Logan is good people. Good friend to Alec."

"Thank you, Joshua." Logan smiled a tired smile. "So are you."

"Max be back soon," Joshua said. "Alec will be okay now? Not hurt or sick? Better?"

"Yeah," Logan answered with a nod of his head. "Yeah, Alec'll get better now. He'll be fine." Joshua smiled at him, as though he believed every word.

Logan looked down at Alec's face, so pale even in the darkness. His condition hadn't improved any in the past hour, but he was out of that place, and back with people who cared about him. He was struck by just how young Alec looked at that moment, by how young he actually was, and by the fact that he'd only existed in the real world for a few weeks. It wasn't fair that this had happened to him, not when he'd actually seemed to be making some progress in breaking himself away from Manticore.

He reached out and gently brushed away a clump of sweaty hair that had fallen into Alec's eyes.

"He'll be just fine." Logan could tell from the look on Joshua's face that he'd managed to convince the dog-man that his words were the truth.

If only it were so easy to convince himself.


	8. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

Logan kept a lot of things in his car that he'd never actually had a use for but thought might come in handy some day. The bolt cutters that Max had used to cut the damned dog chain off of Alec's ankle was one of those things.

So when they arrived at Sam Carr's clinic, and Sam met them in the basement with a nurse and gurney, at least that one visible sign of his torture was already gone. But the rest still remained.

They'd known it was bad, but the dim light in the basement, and the darkness of the park and car had hidden a lot from them. So when Joshua placed Alec gently on the gurney and stepped back, the three of them got their first real look at Alec's condition.

Max had known that Alec was pale, but she hadn't realized just how little color his skin had until he was lying there, uncovered, with the fluorescent lights shining down on him. Bruises stood out in stark contrast to his skin, varying shades of deep blue and purple mixed with some fading yellow that mottled his arms, chest and face. There were more of the small puncture wounds than Max had seen in the basement. All of them were swollen with dried blood caked around them, and some of them looked infected. With the chain removed, the damage that had been done to the skin underneath was plainly visible, and his ankle was covered in ragged, angry, torn flesh that oozed blood. The fever-flush on his cheeks had spread down his neck and flared out across his chest.

But the worst was the blood and pus that were running so freely from his side. The bandage, which had already been soaked through when they'd found him, was almost dripping with it. And the blood stain that Max had seen on his jeans spread out across his abdomen and almost all the way to his knee.

She saw it all in a matter of seconds, because that was all the time she had before Sam and his nurse were running toward the elevator, pushing Alec between them.

Max drew a shaky breath and let it out slowly, then brought her hand to her mouth. Now that the rush to get Alec to medical attention was over, she felt completely drained. Her knees were so weak and shaking so badly that she was surprised she hadn't fallen over.

Logan saw her having trouble and reached his hand out to steady her. She flinched, and he stopped, pulling his hand back to point at her instead and saying, "Joshua."

She felt Joshua's strong hand on her back, and she drew as much strength and comfort from it as she did from the look in Logan's eyes, the look that said he wanted nothing more than to wrap her in his arms and hold her. And she wished, really wished, that he could, because she wanted that as much as he did.

"All right, little fella?" Joshua asked.

"Yeah," she said with a nod of her head. "Yeah, big fella. I'm good."

"We should get upstairs," Logan said softly.

Max nodded again and headed for the elevator. Logan turned to walk beside her, and Joshua followed behind.

"No," Max said gently as she turned around. "Joshua, you can't... you have to go home now."

"But, Alec..."

"Upstairs people, Joshua," she explained. "Lots of them. The only reason no one said anything down here is because they were too worried about Alec, but if you go upstairs with us..."

Joshua dropped his head and stared at his feet. "Screaming and crying and running away."

"Yeah," Max answered sadly. "Lots of it."

She was still holding the jackets they'd wrapped Alec in to try and keep him warm, and that included Alec's own. She reached into the pocket quickly and pulled out his cell phone.

"Take this with you," she said as she handed it to Joshua. "When it rings, you push that green button right there. We'll call you every time something changes, okay? You'll always know."

Joshua nodded without speaking again, then turned to walk out of the clinic.

"Be careful going home," Logan called.

Max watched until Joshua disappeared from view, and then turned back to Logan. "You remember that feeling I had the last time we were here?"

"You didn't know, Max," Logan said. "There's no way you could have known what was happening to him."

"Three days!" she cried out, then bit back her anger and took a deep breath. "They had him for three days, torturing him and cutting him up and... I didn't even know he was missing, Logan. I didn't even notice that he was gone."

"You didn't know." Logan's voice was soft and gentle, and far more forgiving than she deserved.

"I should have," she said. "How did I not notice? If it hadn't been for Cindy, I still wouldn't know anything was wrong."

"But you do," Logan pointed out. "And we found him."

"Not soon enough." She turned sharply and walked toward the elevator again.

"He'll make it through this, Max."

"That's not the point!" She pushed the call button angrily. "The point is that I should have known. I should have known something was wrong when he left Crash without telling anyone. And I did... I did know. I just didn't want to bother with him."

"Max, stop."

"What happened to him is on me," she said. The elevator doors opened and she stepped in with Logan right behind her. "And I'll never forgive myself for it."

* * *

Two hours had come and gone since Joshua had pulled Alec out of the back of Logan's car, and they didn't know any more than they had then.

Logan's phone had rung a half an hour after they arrived, and he'd stepped away to answer it. Max hadn't followed him. Fifteen minutes after that, a man she didn't know had walked into the hallway where they were sitting, carrying a cooler. He handed it to Logan, Logan handed him an envelope, and then he left.

Logan had taken the cooler to one of the nurses at the desk across the hall from them, and Max hadn't seen it since.

"One less thing for Alec to worry about," was all he said as he sat back down.

Max had just finished her latest round of pacing and settled down in her chair when the door to Alec's room opened. She was back on her feet and standing at attention before Sam had stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him.

"He needs a hospital."

Logan shook his head quickly. "That's not possible, Sam. You know that."

Sam took a deep breath and sighed. "I don't know if I can help him here, Logan. Do you have any idea how sick he is?"

"He shouldn't still be sick," Max said. "He's an X5. All you should have to do is patch him up a little bit and let his immune system do the rest."

"That's the problem," Sam said. "It's not working."

"What's not working?" Max asked.

"His immune system. Have you ever seen an X5, or any Transgenic, get an infection that bad, Max?"

"No," she answered slowly. "Because the stem cells..."

"He doesn't have any."

Max shook her head vehemently. "No. That's not possible. Of course he has them. He was born with them!"

"I've tested his blood three times now. When you first got here, I couldn't see any on the slide at all. An hour ago, I saw one. Just now, I saw three."

"So they're replicating?" Logan asked. "Like Zack's nanocytes did?"

"There was a machine!" Max said, remembering what she'd seen at the funeral home. "In the room where they... operated... on him. It had all these tubes, and it looked like it was full of blood."

Sam nodded slowly. "That's got to be the machine Zack told us about. So they hooked Alec up to it and scrubbed his blood the way they did Zack's. Only since there were no nanocytes to scrub out..."

"It took his stem cells," Max finished. The full gravity of the situation finally hit her, and she fell back into her chair again.

"What does that mean, exactly?" Logan asked.

Sam glanced at Max briefly before answering. "It means that for all intents and purposes, right now, Alec has no immune system to speak of. And he's got a raging systemic infection that started from that incision."

Max closed her eyes and shook her head. She'd known he was sick. It had been impossible to look at him and not see how sick he was. But she'd never imagined that his body wouldn't be able to fight it the way it was designed to. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.

"What else is wrong with him?"

"Max..."

"Just tell us, Sam," Logan said. "Please."

"Okay," Sam said with a nod. "You might want to sit down, Logan. Because this is going to take a while."

Logan pulled a chair out from the wall, turned it to face Sam and Max, and sat down.

"Starting at the top. The kidney removal 'surgery.' It was done sloppily, but by someone who's apparently no stranger to doing it. The incision was sutured correctly initially, but there were problems with it after the fact. At some point, Alec managed to rip most of his surface stitches out, and a few of the internal ones, as well."

"He stood up and tried to walk out of there," Max said softly.

"That would do it," Sam answered. "No one ever bothered to put them back. So he's been slowly oozing blood ever since then. When did you say his kidney was removed, Logan?"

"We don't know for sure," Logan said. "All we know is that they started advertising it on Saturday. Eyes Only was alerted to it yesterday."

"That works with what that incision looks like. I'd say it was probably removed some time on Saturday."

Max didn't speak, just listened and rubbed her forehead repeatedly.

"The good news, if there is such a thing, is that we've gotten the bleeding stopped. We also drained as much infection as we could out of the incision and left it open. It'll keep draining as long as it needs to. So that's one problem that we have managed to fix."

"Well, that's something positive," Logan said under his breath.

"And I wish I could tell you that it's all uphill from here, but that is far from his only problem."

Max's shoulders slumped even more.

"The bleeding has dropped his blood volume, which has dropped his blood pressure. It's dangerously low right now. And the fact that so much of what's circulating is infected isn't helping. He needs blood, but I'm not willing to risk using any that didn't come from an X5 donor, and not just because getting some stem cells back would increase his odds tremendously," Sam said. "Max, you could..."

"No!" she interrupted. "The virus, and Logan..."

Sam nodded his head. "I was going to say, you could give him a transfusion. If you didn't have that virus in your system. I'm not worried about the danger to Logan, because I think Alec would learn to deal with that the same way you have, but because as sick as he is, I'm worried that putting that virus in his bloodstream just might kill him. So, do you know any other X5s that you can get here?"

"There's no one," Max muttered. "The only other X5 I know a location for is Zack..."

"And Zack's obviously out," Logan finished. "Since he doesn't know what he is."

Sam sighed. "Then, honestly, at this point? I'd rather that he not be given any blood at all. I can't stress enough just how weak he is right now, and I can't in good conscience risk making him sicker by giving him blood that his body might reject. His blood volume is low, but I have to assume that he was given blood during the surgery. They gave him enough to keep him from bleeding to death, and they did manage not to kill him with a type mismatch, which is something to be grateful for, but there's no way of knowing how old that blood was, where it came from, how it was stored, whether it was screened..."

"You mean they might have given him contaminated blood?" Logan asked. "Could that be where the infection came from?"

Sam shrugged. "It's possible that it's making it worse, certainly. I mean, we all know that the X5 body is designed to work in a very specific way, and if any one system gets knocked out of whack, there's a huge chance of cascading failure to all the other systems. Amateur surgery with inadequate anesthesia, no sterilization procedures, potentially contaminated blood, none of the stem cells that he's supposed to have, resulting in a malfunctioning immune system – it's a recipe for disaster, and it's only going to get worse."

"That's an understatement," Max muttered.

"We're giving him fluids, to try and bring his volume back up. But his body has been through a tremendous trauma, and the stress placed on his other organs is devastating. There's no easy way to say this..."

"There hasn't been an easy way to say any of it," Logan said. "Why start now?"

Sam nodded and continued. "His other kidney is showing early signs of failure. And the more fluids we give him, the worse it's going to get."

"Can't you just put his back in?" Logan asked. "I gave it to the nurse..."

Sam shook his head. "We've got it in stasis, to preserve it, and I'm hoping I can get a surgeon friend of mine over here to put it back, but right now, he wouldn't survive the surgery. His blood volume's too low, his blood pressure's too low, and his fever is too high."

"How high?" Max asked.

"Right now? One-oh-eight. That's seven degrees above normal, the equivalent of a one-oh-five fever in a normal human. And it's rising with every minute that infection goes unchecked. We've got him on the strongest antibiotics we have, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything. It might be slowing it down, but it's not reversing it, that's for sure. And with all the different drugs already in his system, I'm worried about giving him anything to bring it down."

Max sat back in her chair and leaned her head back against the wall.

"I don't know what he was given when, but there's a mixture of narcotics in his blood that reads like a pharmacology manual, and I don't know how they got their hands on any of it. Versed, morphine, fentanyl, propofol, midazolam, sevoflurane, ketamine, Rohypnol, GHB... it's like they just gave him some of everything they had, with no real reasoning behind it."

"It would have been hard to knock him out, and harder to keep him that way," Max said. "Amped-up metabolism. Drugs burn through our systems faster." She sat up straight in her chair as a thought occurred to her. "He could have been awake for it!"

"If what you say is true, it's definitely possible," Sam said. "But if he was awake, he'd have passed out from the pain long before they actually started taking the kidney out."

"Our pain tolerance is..."

"I don't care how high it is, Max. We're talking pain that is far beyond what you can even imagine. There's no way his mind could have dealt with it. It would have shut down."

"I can't believe this," Max whispered.

"That's the major things," Sam said. "Minor things: the puncture wounds on his torso. I don't know exactly what caused them, but it was something small and sharp, maybe ice picks or possibly small nails. Those are all cleaned, and a couple of the deeper ones are bandaged. His feet were cut up pretty badly, but we cleaned and bandaged them, as well. The same with the cuts and scrapes around his ankle. The bruises on his chest and face are surface damage only. There's no underlying internal injuries, no internal bleeding, and no sign of any damage to his ribs. No broken bones, and no head injuries."

"Thank God for small favors," Logan said. He'd leaned forward in his chair, and was holding his head in his hands the way Max had done earlier.

Max turned to Sam, and could tell from his face that there was something else. Logan noticed the silence and looked up, glancing from Max to Sam and back again. He picked up on it, too.

"What, Sam?" he asked. "What aren't you telling us?"

Sam put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, rubbing his hands back and forth nervously. "He was tortured. You both know that." Max and Logan nodded in unison. "The GHB in his blood... it wasn't a very large amount, but that drug metabolizes out of a normal human in a matter of hours. Which means he'd been given some not long before you got there. You said that they'd been there with him until you got there?"

Max and Logan nodded.

"Then they probably used it to make sure he'd stay put and be quiet until they got back. I'm going to have to say that he was given such a large dose that his body was having trouble getting rid of it all."

Sam took a shaky breath, and Max found herself wishing that he'd just spit it out already.

"GHB and Rohypnol both have a street use, which I'm sure you're both aware of." Again, they nodded their heads. "So, I checked. And there is every indication that Alec has had intercourse in the past seventy-two hours."

Max closed her eyes.

"Sam, that's... he wouldn't. He couldn't! I mean... could he?"

"If it happened before the surgery, while he was drugged but not seriously injured? As part of the torture? There's no reason why not. And some of the drugs in his system make me think that..."

"Man or woman?" Max asked without opening her eyes.

A few second of silence followed, punctuated only by Logan coughing.

"All of the genetic material we've recovered has been female."

Max opened her eyes and looked over at Logan. There'd been a girl with them when they'd left the funeral home, the same one Max had seen talking to Alec at Crash two weeks earlier.

"But there is actually some good news in there. He's been given so many mind-altering drugs in the past three days that he probably won't remember any of it. If I'm right, and it was ketamine they used to get him out of the bar in the first place, he probably won't remember anything that happened after that."

"Yes, he will," Max said. "We're designed to resist drugs like that. That's why they had to give him so much. It would've kept wearing off. He'll remember everything that happened unless he was unconscious."

Again, the hallway was silent as each of them contemplated what they'd learned and wondered how the hell it had all happened in only three days. It was Logan that finally spoke a few moments later.

"What's his prognosis, Sam? Honestly?"

"Honestly? I can't really give you one. If his body was functioning the way it's supposed to, right now I'd be sending him home. But it's not. And with all the different systems involved, I don't know when, or even if, it will again. If he had his full amount of stem cells..."

"You said they're replicating," Max said. "They're coming back."

Sam nodded again. "Yes, they are. But Max, I can't promise you that they'll replicate fast enough to do any good before that infection kills him. Or before his blood pressure bottoms out. Or before he goes into renal failure. Or before the fever..."

"So it's a race," Max said. "Between how fast his body can fix itself and how fast it can die?"

"I'm amazed he's made it this far. A normal human in his condition would have died hours ago, at the latest. He's fighting hard, but he's got another twelve hours to go," Sam said. He pushed himself up out of the chair and looked down at them both. "I wish I could give you better news, I do. But all I've got for you right now... if he makes it through the next twelve hours, he's got a chance." He put his hand on Max's shoulder and squeezed it lightly. "I'm sorry, Max."

Max nodded as she watched him walk away.

She stood and walked toward Alec's room, but made herself stop at the window rather than follow Sam inside. She could see Alec there in the bed, still pale, still flushed, with a clean, white bandage on his side, an oxygen mask over his face, surrounded by machines and monitors, with tubes and wires running every which way. She heard Logan's soft footsteps behind her, felt him step up beside her. Together they stood there, watching over Alec.

And it wasn't lost on Max that if she had been doing that on Friday night, neither of them would have had to do it then.


	9. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

It was another hour before Max worked up the courage to walk into Alec's room. Sam had known she'd end up there, she guessed, because there was a chair already waiting for her next to the bed. She crossed to it slowly and sat down, but found that even with him right in front of her, even with him being clean and cared for, she still couldn't look directly at him.

Because she knew that no matter what happened, no matter if he lived or died, she was responsible for it.

She'd already called Joshua and given him as many details as she'd thought he could handle. She'd left out some of the "minor" stuff Sam had told them, and she hadn't mentioned the twelve hour thing. So Joshua was sitting at home, safe and comforted by the thought that they'd gotten to Alec in time and that he was going to be just fine.

She didn't want to think about how she'd explain it to him if Alec died. No, she couldn't think about it. Because it wasn't going to happen. Alec was going to get through this, and he was going to be perfectly fine and back to being a pain in her ass in no time. Nothing else was possible.

She knew that she wasn't going anywhere until Alec woke up; she'd sit in that chair until he opened his eyes and looked at her. But she knew that she couldn't sit there in silence the whole time, or she'd go mad.

"Sam... Dr. Carr," she began. "He says you can hear me. I don't know if I believe him or not, but I want to. I want you to hear me, soldier, because I'm going to give you the single most important order you've ever been given, and I expect you to carry it out."

She leaned forward in the chair and reached through the rails of the bed, grabbing Alec's hand tightly in hers. "You are going to fight this. Do you hear me? And you are going to win." She still couldn't look at him, so instead she stared at their hands, at his fingers so warm and dry under her own. "You're not going to let them win, because you're stronger than them. And you're not going to..." She swallowed hard and wished that the lump in her throat would go away.

"You're not going to die, Alec," she whispered. "I am ordering you not to die. Do you hear me?" She could feel the moisture growing in her eyes but ignored it.

"You were right, you know. About Zack. And if I'd listened to you, instead of getting mad, things would be a lot different for you right now. None of this would have happened. But I didn't listen, did I? Not when you told me about Zack, not when you tried to tell me that the Steelheads would come after you..." It came out as a whisper, but she'd finally gotten the words to flow, and she wasn't stopping.

"I'm so sorry, Alec," she admitted. "I'm sorry about all of it. That I didn't listen, that I didn't protect you, that I didn't come for you sooner, that I didn't..." She wiped the tears from her cheeks impatiently with her left hand. "I'm just sorry, okay? And I need you to get better. I need you to beat this, and come back where you belong."

There was no response, but she hadn't really been expecting one. She'd hoped and prayed, but Sam had been certain that Alec wouldn't be waking up for at least another eleven hours. But Sam didn't know Alec the way she did, didn't know how stubborn he could be. He'd be awake a lot sooner than Sam said he would.

"You take a couple hours, sleep it off," she said softly. "I'm not going anywhere."

* * *

Logan walked into the room two hours later, after having been forced by both Sam and Max to take a nap in the room next door. He found Max leaning forward in her chair, her head resting on her crossed arms on the mattress next to Alec's hip, her hand still wrapped around his, and sleeping. He smiled and walked around the bed to stand at the other side.

Alec didn't look any better than he had the last time Logan had seen him from that distance, with the exception that the dried, crusted streaks of blood and dirt and pus that had covered him from head to toe had been washed away. All of the bandages were clean and white, no signs of infection-tainted blood on any of them. The same couldn't be said of the bag that hung at the foot of the bed, the one that was slowly filling with blood-tainted urine and showing them all just how close his remaining kidney was to failing.

Logan knew the truth that the bandages covered, knew how deep the hole in Alec's side went and knew what was festering inside of it. His face and chest were still flushed with fever, and his sweat-soaked hair stuck to his forehead in clumps. Logan reached down and gently pushed it away, just as he'd done in the park. He couldn't help but brush his hand along Alec's skin as he did it, and shook his head at the heat that radiated off of him.

"How high is it now?"

Logan smiled tiredly and looked across the bed, unsurprised to see Max looking back at him with red-rimmed eyes.

"At the last check, it was up to one-oh-eight point five. Sam says if it gets any higher, they're going to have to start rubbing him down with alcohol to bring it down."

Max sat up straighter in her chair and sighed. "I don't think he's gonna..."

"Don't say it, Max," Logan interrupted. "Don't give up on him yet. He's still alive, he's still fighting. He's still got a chance."

"No, he isn't," Max said tiredly. "He's just laying there!"

Logan was shocked at her words, and he let that show on his face. "Exactly what do you expect him to do, then?"

"I expect him to beat this."

"Then give him a chance to," Logan said patiently. "You've got to give him time, Max. No one could recover from something like this that quickly. Not even you."

Max stood from the chair angrily and stalked to the window. She looked out over the city, her gaze distant, pretending not to see or hear either Alec or Logan in the room with her.

"Max, you can't..."

"It's my fault, ya know."

Logan barely heard the soft words, but he disagreed with them immediately, and he shook his head. "No, it isn't."

"Of course it is." Max turned around, leaned her back against the window, and crossed her arms in front of her. "I let him out, remember? And I made him all those promises, told him how he'd be safe out here. How we were free. How the things that happened at Manticore were never going to happen again. And now look at him."

"But you didn't lie," Logan protested. "He is safer out here than he was there. And he is free. And he'll never be sent out on another mission."

"No, not the missions, Logan. The torture sessions. Reindoctrination. The experiments. I always thought it was so bad but... compared to what just happened to him? It was nothing. Cut up for money? Tortured for 'fun'? At least Manticore had a reason. This is just..." She turned her head slightly and looked Logan directly in the eye. "Do you call this free? Do you call this safe?"

Logan shook his head. "I call this," he said, gesturing at Alec with his hand, "the result of a personal vendetta that has absolutely nothing to do with you."

"Built, born and bred to fight, Logan. That's what we are. But what if... what if this is a fight he can't win?"

He looked back down at Alec again, and then at Max across his shoulder. "Do you really think he's going to blame you?"

"I hope so."

"Why?" he demanded. "'Are you enjoying playing the self-loathing martyr in this story?"

The look on her face said the words had stung her, and he was satisfied. That had been his intention. "When he wakes up..."

"If," she said quietly.

"When he wakes up," Logan said again, emphasizing the word 'when,' "he's going to need you. And he's going to need to know that what happened to him isn't going to happen again. If you try to take the blame for what happened to him, he's not going to get either of those things."

"Why shouldn't I take the blame for it?" she demanded, pushing away from the window and walking back toward the bed. "No one else is going to pay for it."

"Yes, they will," Logan corrected. "They're going to pay for everything they did to him. I'm going to make sure of that. You saw that place, Max, and you heard what Sam said. I thought they were just stealing from the organ banks, but this is not the first time Eddy's cut someone open like this." He gave Max a few seconds to let that sink in before he continued. "How many people have they done this to? How many people have they killed like this?"

He saw that she understood him, could see in her eyes the implications of what he'd said.

"I'm going to take them down, Max. My way. And I'm going to see to it that they stay that way."

Max looked back up at him. "What do you need me to do?"

"Stay with Alec," he answered. "Make sure he's not alone when he wakes up. And stop blaming yourself for what happened, because it's not your fault."

Max nodded her head as she walked back to the chair and sat down.

Logan rounded the foot of the bed as he headed for the door. He stopped and turned back to her. "And get some more sleep," he suggested. "You look terrible."

Then he was out the door and gone.

* * *

He only went as far as the hallway.

He leaned against the wall opposite Alec's door, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed a number he knew by heart. He almost felt bad about calling after midnight, but he didn't have much of a choice. This needed to start moving forward as soon as possible.

"Detective Sung." His voice sounded tired, but not overly so. Logan guessed he'd caught him before he went to bed.

"Matt," he said pleasantly. "It's Logan."

"Logan," Matt returned cheerfully. "I haven't heard from you in a while. Where've you been hiding?"

"I've been busy," Logan answered dismissively. "I've got a tip for you, though, and it's one that needs to be acted on tonight."

"Oh, yeah?" He could imagine the smile on Matt's face, imagine him pulling out a notebook and pen to write down every word he said. "What have you got?"

"You know that organ trafficking ring that we've been watching?" Logan asked. "The Steelheads we've been trying to build a case against?"

"Yeah."

"They took one of my operatives, Matt," Logan said. He'd been running this over and over in his head for hours, and he knew that Matt wouldn't question it. "And they hurt him... messed him up pretty bad."

"Is he all right?" Matt asked with genuine concern in his voice.

"He's in the hospital." Another small lie, but the less Matt knew about Alec, the better off they'd all be. "It's too early for them to be sure, and we're hoping, but there's a chance he won't...," Logan shook his head and pushed the thoughts away. It was so much easier to be positive for Max than it was to convince himself of the same. "Matt... when we found him, he was missing a kidney."

"Missing a – what? How?"

"Eddy and his gang cut it out. They tied him to a table and performed an amateur major surgery on him."

"What's the evidence?"

"Blood," Logan answered. "A lot of it."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"The old Miller Funeral Home, in Sector Four. Do you know it?"

"Of course I know it."

"Get a warrant and go. Make sure it includes searches in the embalming room and the basement. Eddy and his boys aren't exactly the type to clean up after themselves, so I'm sure you're going to find a lot of blood and tissue samples. I know it's there, because I've seen it. I just don't know how many people we're talking about." Logan paused and took a deep breath. Now came the one part of his plan that he wasn't all that sure would work. "But I need you to do me a favor with this, Matt."

"Sure, Logan, anything. What?"

"The freshest blood and tissue you'll find in that embalming room came from my operative, and I need you to lose it somewhere."

"Why would you want that?" Matt asked, the enthusiasm in his voice suddenly replaced with suspicion.

Logan sighed deeply. He'd known that he'd have to explain it, because he had to admit that asking Matt to lose evidence was a pretty drastic measure. He wanted the police climbing all over the funeral home, digging out every scrap of genetic material they could find from every person who'd ever been there.

Except Alec.

"He's just a kid, Matt. And he's hurt badly. There's a chance he might not live through the night. What they did to him..."

"And you don't want me to catch the people that did it?" Suspicion had given way to confusion, but Logan knew that Matt was caving. "Why not?"

"No, I want you to catch the people that did it," Logan insisted. "That's why I'm giving you this information. What I don't want is my operative involved in the investigation. If he survives, I want him to walk away from this. I don't want anyone to know that he had anything to do with bringing the Steelheads down."

"You're trying to protect him."

"Of course I am," Logan said. "I protect all of my people. And before you ask, yes, Eyes Only is on board with asking you to help us. He really is just a kid, Matt, and he's got enough to worry about just trying to survive. He doesn't need to be called to testify against these people."

"All right," Matt said, after a few seconds of consideration. "No one'll ever know your boy was there, Logan. I promise. But you're sure we'll find enough to take them down without it?'

"Oh, yeah," Logan answered. "I'm not sure what you're going to find in the rooms in the basement, but I don't think it's going to be very pretty."

He heard Matt snap his notebook shut on the other end of the line. "Thanks, Logan. I'll keep you in the loop as much as I can, okay?"

"Yeah, thanks, Matt."

Logan leaned his head back against the wall and he snapped his phone closed. He was equal parts satisfied and disappointed with the deal he'd just worked with Detective Sung. He was glad that Eddy and his goons were going down and were going to stay down for a long, long time. But he really wished that they could pay, somehow, specifically for what they'd done to Alec.

They would have to take their justice where they could get it.

* * *

Every hour on the hour, Sam Carr came into Alec's room to check on him. Alec was fighting, he would say. His lungs were weak, but they were still working and that was a good sign. His fever hadn't dropped, but it hadn't gone any higher, the antibiotics were doing their job. The drugs were clearing his system. His stem cells were replicating. His other kidney hadn't failed. Yet.

Max listened to him every time he he talked, but it didn't seem to her like anything was actually getting better, because he said the same things every single time.

It was just after 9am. They'd been at the clinic for more than twelve hours, and she hadn't left Alec's room in over nine of them. Sam had just been in again, given the same speech he'd been giving all night long, but this time he'd added that it looked like the incision might be starting to heal up. He'd mentioned calling his friend the surgeon to see when they could schedule the surgery to put Alec's kidney back in.

Max stood at the window, watching the sun rise higher in the sky. Logan had gone down to the employee break room to grab them some coffee and donuts for breakfast, and she was expecting him back any minute.

The first out-of-sync beep from one of the machines at Alec's bedside caught her attention and made her listen more closely. The second made her turn around. By the time the third sounded, she was on her way across the room and back to Alec's side.

Logan walked through the door at that moment, and she heard him put down the tray he was carrying and jog across to the other side of the bed.

"What is it, Max?" he asked. "What's going on?"

"I don't know," she answered truthfully. "His heart monitor's beeping funny."

They were both looking at Alec when he flinched and his eyelids fluttered without opening.

"Alec!" Max cried out in surprise. "That's it, Alec. Come on. It's time to wake up."

Logan ran to the door and threw it open. "We need some help in here!" he called out to the hallway. He didn't wait to see if anyone answered before running back to the bed again.

Alec's eyes weren't open yet, but his arms and legs were twitching. Logan wrapped his hand around Alec's left wrist, both to let Alec know he was there and to keep him from dislodging the IV in the back of his hand. Alec pulled away, or rather, Alec tried to pull away. He was too weak to actually manage it, but it was enough to let Logan know that he didn't like it.

"Hey, Alec, easy," Logan said. "It's just me. It's Logan." The beeping from the monitors was becoming frantic, speeding up and getting louder. If he kept this up, he was going to give himself a heart attack. Logan started rubbing his other hand up and down Alec's upper arm, trying to comfort him. "Alec, you've got to calm down. Take it easy."

Logan's words didn't seem to be doing much to soothe him, though, and if anything his struggles increased.

"Alec!" Max shouted. "Alec, stop!"

Alec was fighting them with everything he had, which admittedly wasn't much. But it didn't stop him from thrashing about on the bed, sliding his feet up and down the mattress, trying to pull his arms away from their hands. His head was turning back and forth on the pillow frantically, but his eyes still weren't open. His lips were moving, saying something over and over again, but he wasn't making a sound and she didn't understand him.

Sleeping. Dreaming. Nightmares.

"He doesn't know it's us!" she suddenly realized. She glanced up at Logan through the tears that had sprung into her eyes at the realization. "He thinks it's them. He's still trying to escape."

"Help!" Logan bellowed in the direction of the door. Alec was too weak to do much damage to anyone but himself, but Max agreed with Logan not letting go of his arm. If he pulled his IVs out, or managed to make that wound bleed again...

"We need help!"

"Alec, listen to me!" Max kept her right hand on Alec's wrist, but she put her left hand against the side of his face. "Alec!"

"Max," she heard Logan say. She turned to look at him, and he nodded his head at Alec's side. When she looked down, she saw the fresh blood that was slowly seeping its way through the bandage that covered his incision.

"Damn it, soldier, you stop this! You stop this right now!"

Max didn't know if Alec heard her or if it were just a coincidence, but he stilled under their hands. For a few seconds, there was nothing, no sign that Alec had ever moved at all; even the heart monitor was back to beating like normal.

Then Alec's back arched up from the bed, his head flew back, and he screamed.

Max had never thought she'd hear a scream like that from Alec, and she was almost shocked enough to let go her hold on his arm. She held on, but she felt the tears running down her cheeks. There was so much pain in that sound, pain and fear and desperation.

Hopelessness.

She glanced across at Logan, and wasn't surprised to see his eyes were tearing up, too.

And then it was over. Alec's scream died as he relaxed into the bed. Max felt his muscles go limp under her hand and turned back to him.

He was looking up at her from his pillow, green eyes wide open. Everything she'd heard in his scream was written in those eyes, and she had to force herself to smile down at him.

"Hey," she said softly. "Welcome back."

She could see his lips moving under the oxygen mask, but she couldn't hear what he was saying. She bent over and lowered her ear to his mouth so that she could understand him.

"Not... real."

"No, Alec," she said quickly. "This is real. You're at Dr. Carr's clinic. We found you in the basement and we..."

"Not... coming."

"What?" she asked. "Who's not coming?"

"Max. Not... coming. Not... real."

She straightened up in shock. "No, Alec. You're wrong. I did. I was. I..."

Hands grabbed her arms and moved her away from the bed, but it wasn't soon enough. She'd already heard what Alec had to say, already seen the look in his eyes that said he'd never believe her, already seen him close his eyes and turn away from her.

In Alec's mind, none of this was real, because Max wasn't coming. So it wasn't possible for him to be out of that place, to be safe and warm, surrounded by doctors and a couple of friends, getting better with every moment that passed.

"Max?"

She heard Logan's concerned voice, but she couldn't focus on it. All she could hear was Alec's voice, his words repeating in her head, telling her all she needed to know about who Alec had wanted the most while he was being tortured. Who he'd called for, who he'd needed. And who hadn't been there.

And she knew she should stay, but she couldn't. She had to get away from him, away from the pain-filled eyes and terrified screams. Away from the proof of her own part in what had happened to him.

She shoved past the nurses that were filling the room and out into the hallway, then turned and ran toward the door. But no matter how fast she ran, she couldn't escape her own thoughts or the truth of what she'd just realized.

In Alec's mind, Max hadn't saved him at all. In Alec's mind, she hadn't even tried.


	10. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

Max had barely made it out the door before she heard a voice calling out her name, pulling her up short and cutting off her escape.

"Max!"

Original Cindy was crossing the parking lot in front of her, heading right for her. She wanted to keep walking, wanted to get as far away from the clinic as she could. She needed to go somewhere she could deal with everything going on in her head by herself – she wanted to get to the Space Needle, where she knew the height and silence would help clear her thoughts – but there was no way she could run away from Cindy. She'd tried that before, and it had never turned out well.

So she stopped where she was and waited for O.C. to reach her side.

"What's wrong, Boo?" Cindy asked. "Is it Alec? Is he...?"

Max shook her head. "He's awake. He's..."

"Oh, thank God!" Cindy said. "Girl, made me think something bad happened, the look on your face. He's awake, though? So he's gonna be okay?"

Max shrugged and looked at the ground, unable to make herself look her friend in the face. "I don't know. I... I left. Before the doctor got there."

"Why'd ya do that?"

Cindy was confused, and Max didn't blame her. She'd been calling her every few hours, keeping her updated on Alec's condition, so Cindy knew that Max had been sitting in his room all night. It didn't make any sense that she'd leave before hearing what Sam Carr had to say about Alec's chances for recovery now that he was awake.

But she'd stayed long enough to hear what Alec had to say about things, and that was more than enough.

"He didn't..." She was having a hard time putting it into words, just exactly how the things Alec had said were affecting her. "He doesn't think I'm real," she finally forced out. "Alec doesn't. He thinks... God, Cindy, he thinks I left him there. He thought I wouldn't come for him."

Cindy tilted her head a bit, and Max knew she was considering how to react to that. She wondered if Cindy was asking herself the same questions Max was – what had she done, how badly had she treated him, that he really expected her to just leave him where he was and forget about him? Did he really think she hated him that much?

Cindy's final reaction was a shrug and a huff. "So what?"

Max finally lifted her head and looked at Cindy's face. That wasn't even close to what she'd been expecting her to say.

"What?"

"Why does it matter what he thought when he woke up? Boy's head was messed up, you said. Drugs and fevers and torture make people say things that don't make much sense, right?"

"Yeah, but Cin..."

"Besides, this ain't about you." Cindy's words stung, but that was one of the things Max loved about her the most. She didn't hold back on telling anyone what she thought, especially not the people she really cared about. "You got a place to be, Max, and it ain't out here in the parking lot hiding because Alec, half-dead and out of his head, said something that hurt your feelings."

Max nodded her head wordlessly.

"Okay, this is ridiculous. I come to see Alec, and I ain't spending all my time standing around outside with you. Now, where do I need to go?"

Max sighed deeply. "Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Follow me."

Max turned and headed back into the clinic, with Cindy right behind her.

"'S gonna be okay, Boo. We just got bigger things to worry about right now. Let's get him fixed up, and then we can worry about the little stuff, 'k?"

"Yeah," Max answered. "Yeah, okay."

* * *

Sam Carr was standing in the hallway with Logan when Max and Cindy walked up. Logan looked at them and smiled, nodded his head at Cindy in greeting, then returned all of his attention to what the doctor was saying. Max and Cindy joined them silently.

"The fever's not down far enough yet," Sam was saying. "But it's starting to drop. His heart rate and blood pressure are still too low, but they look like they're on the way up."

"So he's okay, then?" Cindy asked. "He's gonna be good?"

"I can't answer that yet," Sam said. "I need to see what his blood is doing, if the stem cells really have replicated enough to start fighting this. And I really need to get that incision checked and rebandaged. There's enough blood on it now that I'm worried he managed to hurt himself when he was thrashing around in there."

"So do it," Max said, confused. "You don't need our permission to do that."

"No, but I do need his," Sam said. "Or rather, I need his cooperation, and he's not giving that at all right now. He won't let me touch him, and every time I try, he starts fighting again. I'd sedate him, but until I can get a look at his bloodwork and see what drugs he's still got in his system..."

"So you need him to lay still," Cindy said. "Need somebody to talk him into behaving himself?"

"Yes," Sam said. "I'm really glad you came back, Max, because I was thinking you..."

Max was already shaking her head, trying to figure out how she could explain to Sam that Alec wouldn't let her touch him either, since he thought she was an hallucination. Cindy saved her the trouble.

"I got that," she said. "Let O.C. work her magic. I'll have him eatin' outta the palm of my beautiful hand."

Cindy smiled quickly at all three of them before walking into Alec's room. Sam followed her to the door to watch her through the window, and Max and Logan walked behind them slowly.

"What happened, Max?" Logan asked quietly. "Why'd you run out? What did he say?"

Max took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "He doesn't think I'm real," she answered. "Because he doesn't think I looked for him."

Logan tipped his chin in confusion. "So, he didn't expect you to find him? Why did that...?"

"No," she interrupted. "It's not that he didn't expect me to find him. It's that he expected me not to. He thought I wouldn't even try."

"Oh." Logan's voice was full of understanding. "Give him time, Max," he said. "Let him get his head back on straight. We have no idea what they said to him while they were torturing him, but with all those drugs and how much pain..." He stopped long enough to clear his throat. "The point is, it wouldn't have been hard for them to convince him of anything. If they told him that you weren't coming, to keep him feeling isolated, it might take a while to overcome that."

Max nodded again. "I know that. It's just hard, ya know? Knowing that he thought it. Wondering if he still thinks it. Hearing him say it."

"We just have to give him the time and space he needs to get better. Completely better, not just physically. He's bruised and broken in places we can't see. And for now, we start with the most immediate concern, and we concentrate on the physical. Because without that, none of the rest matters."

Max glanced through the window and saw Cindy standing at Alec's side, holding his hand and running her fingers through his hair.

"It still feels wrong," she muttered. "That should be me in there."

"Cindy's good at this," Logan said. "If anyone can get him calmed down enough to..."

Whatever Logan had been about to say was forgotten when Alec started screaming again.

* * *

When Cindy walked through the door, she thought that what Alec needed most was normality. He needed people to treat him the way they always had. He needed to feel like nothing had changed. He needed to not be coddled or babied. The last thing he needed was people acting like he was broken or that he needed someone to fix him.

She managed to hold onto those thoughts until she saw his face for the first time. After that, all she really wanted to do was wrap him up in her arms and hold him until it all went away.

"Alec?" she said quietly.

He didn't answer her, didn't turn toward her or acknowledge her presence at all. He didn't even move. He just stared straight ahead, with his head turned slightly on the pillow, like he was looking out the window. But the glazed, faraway look in his eyes made her think he wasn't seeing much of anything.

"Alec, baby?"

That got a reaction, though not the one she'd been hoping for. He turned his head slowly and blinked a few times when he saw her standing there. Then his eyes narrowed in what she thought looked like suspicion.

"Cindy?"

She could barely hear his voice, and if he hadn't been right in front of her, she wouldn't have recognized it as his. It was small, hesitant, uncertain and weak, and none of those were words that she would have ever associated with Alec.

"Yeah," she said, forcing a smile as she crossed the room to his side slowly. "Yeah, Original Cindy's here. Hear you been givin' your doc a hard time."

Alec shook his head slowly, but didn't speak again. He was still looking at her, though, watching her warily as she approached his bed.

"No? 'S not what he says." If Alec wasn't going to talk, then she'd just fill the silence in the room by herself. She was good at that. "Says you won't let him get a good look at ya."

She was close enough now to see the blood-soaked bandage that had the doctor so worried, and she had to agree that it looked bad.

"You're bleedin', honey," she said, pointing at his side without touching it. "Ya gotta let him fix that."

He didn't take his eyes away from her face when he shook his head again, and the expression he wore was starting to bother her. She couldn't figure out which one of them had more doubt about what he was really seeing.

"Hurt you pretty bad, didn't they?" she asked before she could stop herself. She saw him flinch and mentally kicked herself for her tactlessness. "I'm sorry."

Everything she'd thought about not treating him any differently than she ever had was completely forgotten. She couldn't stop herself from reaching down to take his hand in hers, and even when she felt him tense up, she couldn't make herself let go.

"It's okay, Boo," she whispered to him. "You know Original Cindy ain't gonna hurt you."

His breathing was speeding up, and his body was still tense, and she knew that he needed to calm down. She ran her free hand through his hair gently.

"I got you, baby," she said. "Ain't gonna let nobody hurt you. Not while O.C.'s around."

Alec closed his eyes as he nodded his head, and she could feel him starting to relax. When he leaned his head into her hand, and whispered, "Cindy," she couldn't help but smile down at him.

"That's it," she said. "Gonna be okay now." She knew she could claim it as a victory, but it was one she'd give anything to not have needed to win. And her job wasn't finished yet. "Can I get the doc? You won't fight him this time?"

Alec nodded slowly. "You stay."

"Won't go nowhere," she answered. "Be right here the whole time. Doc'll get that hole in your side fixed right up, and you can stop worryin' your pretty little head about it."

She felt the change immediately. His body went stiff again, he pulled away from her hand, and he stared up at her.

"Wha... what?"

Cindy looked down at him in confusion.

"No," he gasped. "Get off."

"Alec," she said as she tightened her grip on his hand and pressed the palm of her hand against his face. "Calm down, baby. Cindy's..."

"Don't!" It would have been a shout if he'd had the strength for it, and she knew that. As it was, it sounded more like he was begging. He was fighting her, pushing himself as far into the bed as he could go and trying to pull his arm free. "Get away from... don't touch me!"

She didn't know what to do, didn't know what had happened, didn't know what she'd done wrong... but it was becoming clear pretty quickly that she'd managed to send him somewhere in his mind, somewhere he didn't want to be, somewhere that wasn't where he actually was, but he couldn't tell the difference. She'd managed to trigger something, somehow, and she knew for a fact that he wasn't seeing her anymore.

When Alec closed his eyes again, threw his head back and screamed, Cindy's heart slammed into her throat. And suddenly, Max didn't seem quite so selfish for having run away from him.

* * *

Max caught Cindy by the arms when she tried to leave the room.

"He needs us," she said urgently, reminding Cindy of her own words in the parking lot. "We can't keep running. None of us."

"Max, this is... how do you..."

Max took a deep, shaking breath. "It's not really him, remember? He's too sick, doesn't know what he's saying. He doesn't understand what's going on."

"He's so scared," Cindy whispered. She glanced back at him across her shoulder. "The poor baby."

"He's not a baby," Max said. She was watching past Cindy's shoulder, too, watching Logan and Sam trying to bring Alec back from the edge one more time. "He's hurt and he's sick, but that's it. And he's gonna be fine."

Logan was standing at Alec's left side again, the same place he'd been earlier, and he was doing the same things Max had seen him do then – holding Alec's hand in one of his own and rubbing his other hand up and down Alec's arm. Max envied Logan the ability to get that close even as she wondered when he'd gotten it.

Since when did Alec accept comfort and support from anyone? And when exactly had he started accepting it from Logan?

Logan was talking to him, his voice calm and gentle, soothing and reassuring. "It's okay, Alec. You're safe here. You know that. Calm down and breathe. It's all okay."

Max and Cindy stood against the wall, near the door, watching in awe as Logan succeeded at the one thing that neither of them had been able to do – bringing Alec back out of the nightmare he kept getting trapped in.

Alec grabbed at Logan frantically with his right hand, and Logan responded by letting go his hold on Alec's hand and wrapping his fingers around the fist that was suddenly tangled in his shirt.

"Calm down, Alec," he said.

"She's here," Max heard Alec gasp out.

"No," Logan said with a shake of his head. "No, Alec, she's not. That was Cindy. You're at Sam Carr's clinic, remember? There's no one here who doesn't belong. You're safe."

Logan glanced across at Max just long enough for her to see the understanding in his eyes. Both she and Logan knew exactly who Alec thought Cindy was, but neither one of them was going to tell her that.

"No, it... she... she said... called me..."

"Alec, look at me," Logan answered. But Alec didn't look at him, didn't stop talking to himself, so Logan put his right hand on the side of his face and made him. "Look at me. You're sick. You're hurt. I know you're confused and you're scared, but no one here is going to hurt you." Max saw him searching Alec's eyes for recognition, and she could tell that he wasn't happy with what he saw.

"Alec!"

Alec stopped mumbling and focused all of his attention on the man who'd called his name, and Max saw his entire face change. There was no more fear, or anger, or confusion. In Alec's eyes, looking up at Logan, there was nothing but trust.

"Logan," he said.

"Yeah." Logan smiled down at him. "You back with me?"

Alec nodded his head quickly, but didn't let go the hold he had on Logan's shirt.

"Dr. Carr's going to take a look at you now, and you're going to let him. All right?" Alec nodded again, but he looked doubtful. "He just wants to make sure you're getting better. That's all. So he's going to take a little blood and change that bandage on your side."

It only took a couple of minutes for Sam to do what he needed to do, and through it all, Alec kept his eyes on Logan's face and his hand wrapped tightly in Logan's shirt. And Logan was talking to him, his voice steady, explaining everything Sam was doing. Sam looked up and nodded, indicating that he was done.

"Okay, Alec. All done," Logan said. He gently pulled Alec's hand away from his shirt and placed it across his chest. "That's it. That wasn't so bad, now was it?"

Alec shook his head.

"You can go back to sleep now, all right? I have a feeling that you're going to feel a lot better the next time you wake up."

"Logan..."

"We'll talk later, Alec. Right now, you need to sleep, and I need to go with Dr. Carr..."

"No!"

"Shhh," Logan soothed. "I'll be right outside, watching through the window, and I'll be back in no time. Me and Max and Cindy, we're not going anywhere."

"Max..." Alec's voice was weakening as his eyes slid closed. "Need Max..."

Max's heart pounded in her chest and she swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. She felt Cindy's hand on her arm and took a deep breath.

"She's here," Logan said. "And she'll still be here when you wake up."

"Came... for me..."

"Yes, she did. We did."

"Real?"

"We're real, Alec," Logan said. "This is real."

Alec's whole body relaxed, and he stopped fighting the exhaustion that was pulling him under. In only seconds, he'd fallen into a deep, and Max hoped nightmareless, sleep.

Logan straightened up and followed Sam to the door, then held it open and motioned for Cindy and Max to walk out ahead of him. Max saw him take one last look at Alec before he moved out into the hallway.

"I'll go check this," Sam said, holding up the vial of blood he'd finally managed to draw. "I was right about that incision, too. He did rip it open a little, but it's starting to heal on its own. Right now, I think we're all going to be happy with what these results show."

"Thanks, Sam," Logan said.

"No, Logan, thank you. If you hadn't... I don't know how you did it, but I couldn't have done it without you."

Neither Max nor Cindy spoke until after Sam had left.

"How'd you do that?" Cindy finally asked.

Logan shrugged. "I don't know. He did it the first time, too, after you left, Max." He looked over at her, and she smiled at him shyly. "He just listens to me, and acts like he wants me there. I don't know why."

Max nodded her head in sudden understanding. "He thinks he's hallucinating me, and he thinks Cindy is someone else," she said. "You're the only one he trusts right now."

Logan looked through the window and back into the room, watching Alec sleep, looking out for him like he'd said he would. "I know that," he said. "What I don't understand is why it's me he's latched on to."

"Because you're the only one he knows is real," Max answered.

Logan turned toward her, surprised.

"You couldn't be nobody else," Cindy added. "There's only one Logan Cale."


	11. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

It was amazing to Max how much of a difference twenty-four hours could make.

The next morning dawned bright and sunny, a welcome change from the grey and rainy mornings that were so common in Seattle in early autumn. She and Logan had started taking turns sitting with Alec the day before, and he'd even recovered enough to realize that O.C. was just Cindy and not anyone that he needed to be afraid of. The different shifts gave them all a chance to go home for a while, shower and eat. And because Logan had offered to take the night watch, just in case Alec got confused again, Max had even been able to sleep in her own bed.

Well, she would have slept in her own bed, if she'd actually stayed home.

But she'd had a job to do that night, and she couldn't help but smile as she remembered it. Oh, she'd gone above and beyond on this particular job, and she knew that. The shame was that no one else would ever know she'd done it. It had been part justice, part duty, part protectiveness... but mostly it was just revenge. And she'd gotten it. She wondered if she'd ever feel guilty about it, but she really doubted it. She'd owed that Steelhead bitch, and even though she knew they'd never be even, it had made her feel better.

The fact that Lux, whose name Max now knew, felt a whole lot worse made Max feel a whole lot better than it should have.

The best part of the past twenty-four hours was how much Alec had changed.

His fever was almost completely gone. It was still hovering around one-oh-three – not enough to make him seriously ill but enough to keep him from forgetting that he had one – and Sam said it would probably stay there for a few more days. The antibiotics had been holding the infection at bay until his stem cells could start kicking in, which they'd done just as soon as there was enough of them to make a difference. His remaining kidney was starting to recover, as the stress being put on it by everything else that was wrong started to fade. His blood was replacing itself almost as quickly as it was designed to, so both his blood volume and his blood pressure were back up.

He'd be weak and shaky for a few days, which was a long recovery time for a Transgenic, but Max was grateful for it all the same. If he'd been anyone but a Transgenic, she'd have been getting dressed for his funeral instead of thinking about his recovery time.

But the absolute best part was that his body wasn't the only part of him that was returning to normal. The delusions, hallucinations and confusion that the high fever had brought on were already gone. And though he was still a bit uncertain and jumpy at times, he wasn't afraid of them anymore.

He was turning back into the Alec she knew, right in front of her eyes.

When she walked into his room, he was leaning against the raised top of his bed talking to Logan. He looked up at her and smiled.

"Maxie!" he said. His voice was still weaker and shakier than she wanted it to be, but like everything else, she knew that in time it would be back to normal. "Please tell me you brought me a burger. I'm starving."

Max couldn't help the laugh. She'd spent so much of the past two days worrying that Alec wouldn't survive to annoy the hell out of her, and she was going to enjoy it.

At least for a while.

"Nope," she said. She crossed the room and sat down on the edge of his bed, opposite where Logan sat in a chair on the other side. "You're NPO until further notice."

"Oh, come on!" he whined. Max saw from the corner of her eye that Logan was grinning, too. "Starving, Max. Why can't I eat?"

"Because you can't eat before surgery," she said good-naturedly.

She'd learned to spot the cues, to head off what they'd started referring to as his "episodes" before they really got going, and she saw it immediately. His whole body went stiff, his eyes widened, and his breathing sped up.

"What surgery?" he asked.

"Kidney surgery," Max said, then shook her head. Blunt and tactless, as ever. And it sent Alec even closer to the edge. He turned toward Logan the way he'd done so many times in the past twenty-four hours.

"It's okay," Logan reassured him. "It's a real surgeon, a friend of Sam's."

"But why do I... I've only got one left!"

He didn't know, and Max could have smacked herself for that, because he really should have known. Someone should have told him long before then.

"They're not taking the other one out," Logan said. "They're putting yours back in."

"They have it?" Logan nodded. "How'd they get it? Eddy..." Alec paused, and both Max and Logan knew not to interrupt him.

There were some things that Max thought shouldn't bother Alec as much as they did, and saying Eddy's name was one of those things. She'd mentioned it to Logan, and he'd told her that Alec needed to deal with things in his own way, and that telling him he shouldn't be bothered by Eddy's name would only make things worse. So she hadn't said anything to Alec, but she had started paying more attention to the things that bothered him the most, so she could avoid pressuring him about them.

That's how she knew that he hadn't mentioned Lux at all since he'd mistaken Cindy for her.

"He told me they sold it."

"They did," Max said.

Alec's eyebrows shot up.

"They just didn't know who they sold it to," she continued with a nod in Logan's direction.

Alec blinked in confusion and turned back to Logan again, but he didn't look as scared as he had a few seconds before. He was already starting to settle back against his pillows again.

"So," she said, "you've got surgery in a couple hours. So you can't eat."

Alec nodded slowly, then looked down and started playing at the edge of his blanket.

"Hey, Alec," Logan said. "Will you be all right for a few minutes? I need Max's help with something."

Another nod.

"I'll be right back."

Logan motioned for Max to follow him outside, so she stood up. "Back in a few," she said to Alec as she turned and walked into the hallway.

Logan spun around toward her the second the door closed behind them.

"He didn't know?" Logan was obviously as upset about that fact as she was, because his voice had a hard edge to it.

"Yeah, I know," she said. "I can't believe no one told him that his kidney was..."

"No, not that," Logan interrupted. "No one talked to him about the surgery? At all?"

Max pulled back slightly. "I just did."

"Yes, but did you ask him?"

Max was really confused about where the conversation was going. "Ask him what? He needs his kidney back, so he's going to..."

"No!" Max took an involuntary step back, and Logan took a deep breath. "Four days ago, someone tied him to a table and cut out a major organ with no real sedatives or pain management, most definitely without his consent, and while he was awake. And no one thought that maybe, just maybe, he might have a little problem with surgery?"

She hadn't thought of it like that.

"Is he going to die without that kidney?" he asked. "Or get sicker? Does he absolutely need it to live?"

She shook her head slowly.

"Then it's his choice."

"But he won't be..."

"No, he won't be perfect," Logan said. "He might not function at one hundred percent efficiency. But he can live without it. People all over the world do it every day."

"It's not about him just being alive, Logan. It's about him being who he is. And who he is will change if he's not whole."

"It's a kidney, Max, not his soul. Not his personality. It's not him. And you can't order him to do this. It has got to be his decision. The last thing he needs right now is anyone, no matter how well-intentioned they might be, forcing him to do anything he doesn't want to do."

Sometimes, Max really hated it when Logan was right.

* * *

Alec hadn't moved since they'd been gone – he was still sitting up on his bed, pulling at the strings along the edge of his blanket.

Logan and Max crossed the room again, but this time it was Logan who settled himself on the edge of the bed, and Max sat in the chair. He didn't look up at them.

"Alec."

He looked up at Logan slowly, and Max was surprised by how bloodshot his eyes were. They hadn't been like that a few minutes before, had they?

"We're gonna try this again."

"Try what?" Alec asked.

"Eddy did sell your kidney after he removed it, but he sold it locally and to one of my contacts. So I had it, and I gave it to Sam. He's got a surgeon friend that is willing to come over later this morning and put it back in."

Alec's eyes lowered again.

"If you want him to."

His head shot back up. "What?"

"I said he'll put it back in if you want him to," Logan repeated.

"If I..." His voice trailed off, but not soon enough for Max to miss the confusion and uncertainty in it. When he turned to look at her, she read the same in his expression.

"I'm not gonna lie, Alec," she said. "I want you to do it. I think you'll feel better if ya do. But it's nothing you can't live without, so..." She took a deep breath. "It's up to you."

"Really?" he asked.

"Really," she said.

"It's your choice," Logan put in. "What you say goes."

Max could see in Alec's eyes that this was something he hadn't been expecting, and in his shoes, she doubted she'd have felt any differently. The life of a Transgenic wasn't exactly an exercise in free will, after all. Making choices and decisions for himself was something that Alec was still getting used to, and this was no small decision. This wasn't about where to live or what to eat – this was him deciding on something that would affect him, and only him, for the rest of his life.

"If you say yes, he'll be here in a little over an hour," Max said. "And if you say no, he won't be here at all."

Alec looked up at them both through his eyelashes and smiled.

* * *

Alec was in surgery before noon.

Logan wondered if Sam's surgeon friend had ever performed a kidney transplant where the recipient was also the donor, but he dismissed the thought rather quickly as being pointless. He was almost positive that even asking would have been ridiculous.

Max was several feet away from the waiting area chairs that Logan was sitting in, at the end of the hallway, stalking back and forth in front of the closed doors that led to the emergency operating room Sam had set up. And she'd been doing nothing else for over an hour.

Logan turned his head back down the hallway just in time to see Matt Sung walking toward him.

"Matt." Logan jumped to his feet and walked forward to meet his friend and shake his hand. "Did you get that...?"

"All taken care of," Matt said. "You weren't kidding about there being a lot of blood and tissue evidence there. Our forensic guys have only started processing and they've already identified at least six different people."

"What about...?"

"Maybe there should have been seven," Matt said with a shrug. "I don't suppose it really matters, does it?"

"Thank you, Matt," Logan said, and he meant it sincerely.

"You're welcome."

"What about arrests?"

"Three," Matt answered.

"Wait, there were four of them," Logan said. "British Eddy..."

"We got him, and a couple of idiots called Bird and Tuck."

"And the girl?"

Matt shook his head. "She wasn't there when we arrested them. But the strangest thing, she walked into the station about two this morning and turned herself in. She hasn't been arrested yet, though, because she had to be taken for treatment of some fairly recent injuries. Someone really pounded on her."

Logan looked back over his shoulder at Max. He wondered if she'd had anything to do with that, and briefly considered asking her, but it really didn't matter. Max always seemed to have better luck with finding the "bad guys" than the police did, and she'd always had a knack for persuading people to do what she wanted them to do. And, Logan supposed, all things considered... maybe that was for the best.

"Between what we found in that funeral home and the file you sent over, we've got more than enough not only to hold them, but to convict them. They're done, Logan. For good."

Logan turned back around and smiled.

"That's all I needed to hear."

"How's your boy doing?" Matt asked.

Logan sighed. "Better. A lot better. He's in surgery right now, but once that's done, they expect him to make a full recovery. He'll be fine."

"That's good to hear," Matt said. "I don't know for sure, don't know if we'll ever know for sure, but I'd say judging by the amount of decomp we found in that basement... odds are he's one of the few who's survived. If not the only one."

Logan nodded. He'd thought of that, too. Of course, when he thought it, it was always followed by the knowledge of just how close they'd come to losing Alec, too.

"He's lucky," Matt said.

"No," Logan argued. "We are. If we hadn't found him when we did, if we'd lost him..."

The sound of the doors to the operating room opening interrupted him, and he spun around. Sam was standing there, a wide smile on his face.

"He's just finishing closing the incision," Sam announced. "He's amazed at how quickly Alec heals, though. I guess he's never had an incision start closing itself before he could get the sutures in before."

Logan almost laughed.

"Everything went perfectly," Sam continued. "The anesthesia worked like a dream. He's going to be just fine, and at this rate, I'll be sending him home with you before nightfall."

Logan felt the smile spread across his face and turned to look at Max, expecting to see one on her face, too. He didn't expect her to press her back against the wall, slide down it until she was sitting on the floor, and start shaking.

"Matt," he said without turning around. "I've got to..."

"Yeah, me too." Matt was already walking back down the hallway to leave. "I'll let you know if anything changes."

Logan walked over to where Max sat on the floor next to the doors, and crouched down in front of her.

"Max?"

She looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes. "He made it," she whispered.

"Yes," Logan said with a nod of his head. "He did."

Max sighed as she looked at the doors. "What do we do now?"

Logan smiled and wished again that he could just reach out and touch her, because they both needed the contact. "We help him get through the rest of it," he finally said. "Because I don't think it's over yet."

"How do we do that?"

"Follow his lead," he answered. "It's not going to happen overnight, but he's already getting better. I didn't really expect him to consent to the surgery."

"Whatever else Manticore did to us," Max said, "they made sure that we knew how to deal with with things like this."

"How?"

"Repression, disassociation, compartmentalization... we all know how to do it."

Logan shook his head and frowned. "That doesn't sound very healthy."

"Nothing healthy about it," Max agreed. "But it works. And when you're just trying to find a way to survive? That's all that really matters."

* * *

He recognized the grogginess that meant he was waking up from a drug-induced nap, and for a moment, he panicked.

"It's okay, Alec. The surgery went well, and you're just fine."

The sound of Logan's voice put him at ease immediately and he opened his eyes. Logan wasn't the only one in the room with him – Max and Cindy were both standing beside his bed, too. And so was Joshua.

"Joshua... how...?"

He started to push himself up in the bed, but Logan and Max stopped him easily.

"It's okay," Max said. "Nobody's here but us and Dr. Carr."

"Wanted to see annoying little brother," Joshua said.

Alec lowered his eyebrows and blinked in confusion. He had the feeling there was something he was missing, but he couldn't even start to figure it out.

"Alec better?" Joshua asked uncertainly. "Gonna be all good?"

Alec thought about that for a second before he answered. His side was sore, but the piercing, stabbing pain that he'd been feeling since Saturday was gone. It was just a dull throbbing ache now, just another healing wound well on its way to becoming just another forgotten memory. Everything else, from bruises to puncture wounds, was already healed, and the only drugs in his system were the ones he'd been given before surgery. He still felt groggy and light-headed, but Dr. Carr had told him that he'd feel that way for a few more days. Most of the infection was gone from his blood, but not all of it. Once it went away, and took the damned annoying fever with it, he'd feel fine.

"How ya feelin', baby?" Cindy asked.

He smiled up at her, and then at Joshua.

"I'm good, " he said. And he meant it.

"That's good," Max said. "Because you ever scare me like that again, I'll kick your ass."

He started to chuckle, but it turned into a moan rather quickly. "Oh, no laughing," he said. "Hurts."

"You can take it easy for a bit longer," Logan said. "They're kicking you out in a couple of hours, and then you'll be at my place for a few more days. But there's no reason why you can't sleep for a bit longer."

Alec nodded and closed his eyes. "Do I get some pants before I leave?"

He heard all four of them laughing. "I'll see if I can't find you some," Logan said.

He was drifting out, but he blinked his eyes open again. There was something that he needed to say to them, something that he'd been wanting to say for a while.

"Thank you."

His eyes stayed open just long enough for him to see their smiles, and then he was asleep again.


	12. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

It took Alec all of a day to do it again.

"Calm down, Max," Logan said. He was in the wheelchair, following her from room to room as she searched frantically for someone he knew she wasn't going to find. "I'm sure he's fine..."

"He's gone!" she announced. "Gone! He knows he's not supposed to go out by himself right now, knows he's supposed to stay where we can get to him if anything happens, and he's gone!"

"Max, stop," Logan tried again.

She darted from one room to the next, and he was finding it almost impossible to keep up with her.

"Max!"

"What!"

"Stop and think about this for a second," Logan said calmly. "You already know he's not here, so searching the apartment for the third time isn't doing you any good. And I know you're upset he's gone, but no one took him, because there hasn't been anyone here. That means that wherever he is, he went there willingly. He's fine."

"No, he's not 'fine,' Logan," she shot back. "My God, you're as bad as he is! All the fine, fine, fine when no, actually, he's pretty damn not fine! He's sick. He's still weak. He's still having balance problems, sometimes he can barely walk..."

"He's getting better."

"But he's not there yet!" She stormed away from him, heading back into the spare bedroom that Alec was supposed to be sleeping in to check it for the fourth time in five minutes.

"He's not here, either," he said tiredly as he rolled his eyes.

"Willingly!" Max shouted out from the other room. She was back in the hallway in a matter of seconds, standing in front of him, seething.

Logan shook his head. "Yes, willingly," he said. "He probably just wanted to get some fresh air..."

The look in her eyes stopped him before he finished his sentence. Her eyes narrowed, her lips thinned, and she stomped down the hallway.

"That stupid son of a bitch," she muttered as she passed Logan.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"I know where he is!"

The elevator doors closed with a ding, and Logan sighed deeply.

"Wherever you are, Alec," he said to his suddenly empty apartment. "You'd better find somewhere to hide."

* * *

"Are you an idiot?"

"Apparently."

He didn't open his eyes, didn't turn his head, nothing. He just sat there.

"I can't believe you... how could you... what the hell are you doing?"

"Well, it sounds like I'm pissing you off."

"Damn right, you're pissing me off! You weren't supposed to leave the apartment. And you sure as hell shouldn't be here! You can hardly walk in a straight line on the floor. What if you fell?"

"Am I anywhere near the edge?"

He sounded tired, exhausted really, but she didn't care. He should have known better than to take off on his own like that, to not even tell her where he was going. He couldn't just disappear without telling someone. He couldn't just run off and climb the Space Needle whenever he felt like he needed a breath of air.

Okay, so yeah, she did it all the time. But she wasn't the one disappearing on people to get there.

"That is not the point!" she shouted. "The point is that you're..."

"Stop, Max," he begged. "Please."

"I can't believe you were this stupid. It's not safe, and you're too weak to be..."

"Yeah," he said with a sigh. He'd opened his eyes at some point, but he wasn't looking at her. He was staring straight ahead of him, just like he'd done in the clinic, looking at the horizon without really seeing anything. "I know exactly how weak I am."

It wasn't exhaustion in his voice, Max suddenly realized. It was hopelessness. She knew exactly why it was there, and knew that she wasn't helping him at all.

Damn it.

She flopped down on the roof next to him and leaned back against the outside wall of the old observation room.

"Alec..."

"Don't," he said.

"No, Alec, look," she continued anyway. "It wasn't your fault. None of it."

He snorted in disbelief. "Yeah, right."

"And it had nothing to do with how strong you are."

He turned to face her slowly. "I got taken out by an ordinary psycho, two idiots, and a girl."

"Who kept you drugged out of your mind and tied to a table until they carved you like a turkey and chained you up in their basement."

Max knew that Alec really was getting closer to putting the whole thing behind him, because he didn't flinch away from the words they way he would have in the clinic. She took it as a good sign that all he did was close his eyes and shake his head.

"We're strong, Alec. But we're not invincible. Sometimes we need help. Even Transgenics need someone to watch their back, every now and then."

"You ever miss Manticore?"

The question took her by surprise, but she tried not to let it show.

"No," she answered honestly. "Not really. Sometimes I think about the information that we lost," she thought back over the conversation she'd had with Logan on Monday, about the destruction of the DNA database. "But I don't miss it. Why? Do you?"

Alec nodded slowly.

"Really?"

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I miss the 'if you can't deal, we can make you forget' thing."

"You're dealing, Alec," she said. "You're doing just fine."

"You remember the basement, right?" Max didn't speak, but she did nod her head. "I snuck down there once. I think I was fourteen, maybe. And I'd seen them dragging someone down there, and I wanted to see what they were gonna..."

She wanted to tell him to stop, but she knew she couldn't. The similarities between what had happened to him at Eddy's hands and some of the things she'd seen at Manticore hadn't been lost on her, and if he needed to share memories to work through it all at once, then she'd let him.

A humorless chuckle from Alec drew her attention back to him.

"They were doing an autopsy on the kid. And I was fascinated, ya know? Because he was defective, right? And they were figuring out why. And then I saw..." He slid his feet up the roof until his knees were bent in front of him, then rested his elbows against them. He was breathing deeply as he did, obviously trying to keep himself under control.

"I saw his hand move. Not much, just a little, but then I looked at his face and... his eyes were open, and he was crying."

Max swallowed the gasp, but she did close her eyes.

"He was alive," Alec said, needlessly. He had his arms crossed across his knees by then, and he was staring off into the distance again. She wondered if he had to pretend she wasn't there to be able to talk about it. "They had his chest cut open, and they were taking parts of him out, and the kid was not only still alive, but awake. And I always wondered, ya know, did he feel that? And if he did, what did it feel like?"

He snorted another bitter chuckle, but this time, it was mixed with a sob that she knew he'd deny.

"And now that I know the answer to that, I think... I think it would have been better if it had happened at Manticore. Because they knew how to make us stop feeling, didn't they? They were really, really good at making us not feel."

"We have to feel, though," she said. She didn't look at him, just joined him in staring at the darkening skyline. "That's what keeps us human."

"Well, I don't like it."

"No one likes it. At least not all the time. But it gets better with time. I promise you that."

A few seconds of silence passed between them, and it wasn't uncomfortable. But Max had come to ask him a question, and she hadn't gotten around to asking it yet.

"So why did you leave tonight?"

Alec shrugged. "I wanted to take a walk."

"So you climbed out a thirty story window?"

Alec laughed, the first real laugh she'd heard from him in weeks. "Nah," he said with a shake of his head. "I used the elevator."

Max smiled. "So, just a walk, huh?"

"I just... I needed to breathe. You know, I haven't been alone more than a couple of minutes for almost a week now? For someone who's spent most of their life alone, it's a little overwhelming. I just wanted to breathe. And..."

"And what?" she asked gently.

"And see if I could still do something by myself. Without needing a babysitter or a watchdog."

He didn't look at her when he said, but she knew he was talking about her. After he'd decided she was real, she'd hardly left his side. She'd been hovering like crazy since he'd gotten out of the clinic, and she knew it. But it wasn't for the reason he thought it was.

"Alec, I've been..." She didn't know exactly how to say it, but she had to try. "I haven't been staying so close to you because I think you can't do anything by yourself, but... damn it, Alec, I screwed up. I wasn't there when I should have been. I walked away and left you alone that night, and the price you paid for it... well..." She was terrible at it, but she had to make him understand that it wasn't him, it was her. "I just want you to know that you're not alone."

He turned his head toward her and cracked a grin. "I figured that out the first time I woke up with you and Logan standing over my bed."

She had to smile at him, and she nodded her head. "Okay, yeah, point taken."

"I knew you'd come for me," he said softly, and she didn't need to ask him to specify. "I always knew that."

"And I always will," she swore. She gave him a second to let that sink in, and vowed to herself that she'd hold to it, no matter what he thought about it. "So, you made it here by yourself? No problems?"

Alec shrugged. "Maybe a little panic attack or two."

"Yeah?"

He nodded.

"That's actually really good, ya know. Because it's not always about how fast you get there. Sometimes, it's just the fact that you got there at all."

The look in his eyes was enough to tell her that he understood what she meant, and he agreed with her.

Max pushed herself to her feet and turned to climb back into the observation room.

"Where ya going?" If Alec's voice had an edge of nervousness to it, she wasn't going to mention it. And if that was his hand on her leg, she could pretend it wasn't.

"Back to the apartment," she answered. "You're fine here, right?" She reached into her jacket pocket, pulled out his cell phone, and handed it to him.

"Where'd you find this?" he asked in surprise.

"On the sidewalk in front of Crash," she answered. "Thought you might want it back. Gave it an upgrade for ya, even."

She watched as he flipped it open and pushed the button to activate the screen, and she saw the hesitant, shy smile make its way across his face. Everything was exactly the same as it had been the last time he'd had it in his hands, and she knew that. Except that instead of only one name in his contact list, there were two.

"You got my back, Max?" he asked.

"Always."


End file.
